Welcome to The Circuit series. Meet our next interviewee:
AlphaSense is an AI-powered market intelligence platform that is used to inform high-level decision-making.
The firm has been involved in AI since its founding in 2011, recognising even then that the technology and its relationship with data would come to play a critical role in how businesses operate.
In an exclusive interview with UKTN, AlphaSense’s SVP international and UK country director Daniel Sanchez-Grant discusses how developed the AI sector has become, the problems certain businesses have when wanting to incorporate the technology and what is next for AI.
Given how much the AI market has grown, how does AlphaSense stand out from the competition?
There are three dimensions to how we are helping customers win on AlphaSense.
The first is our content, we have spent the last 10 years building over half a billion different content sets: business proprietary, premium perspectives on every industry of the economy and so content is one part of the dimension.
The second is from the very beginning, we had a vision that AI would play a fundamental role in how information is synthesised, understood, summarised.
From the very beginning, we brought AI into the core value of what we do, initially starting with natural language and understanding variation in language to now using some of the most innovative generative AI models for very purpose built workflows.
Then the final dimension is really workflows. Unlike, perhaps more general purpose AI designed solve a whole multitude of different use cases, AlphaSense exists to help strategy and business professionals cut through the noise and really distil everything that is going on in your market, your competitive landscape, the macro economy, down to the very key insights that you need at any given time you need it.
It feels like every month we find new and interesting use cases for AI with different parts of the business
What do businesses often get wrong about incorporating AI into their processes?
There is so much excitement. The promise of AI right now is this huge productivity driver for companies and so everyone is thinking, what does this mean for us? In some cases they are moving quickly to implement what this might mean.
Where people go wrong is adopting AI for AI’s sake, responding to the feeling that they need to instead of actually thinking about what’s the right tool for the specific needs that they have, and how does that fit in with their short and long term goals as a business?
So I think mistakes are doing AI because it is cool, versus actually thinking about what business problem are we trying to solve, and how does this help?
Which sectors have or will go onto benefit most from AI workflows?
There are a few examples. The financial sector is one where we see massive shifts due to AI. AI represents opportunities for optimising their research, doing their due diligence in shorter amounts of time.
For example, investment banks can leverage AI to enhance deal execution. They can identify investment opportunities or structure deals more efficiently, just by automating key financial analysis.
If you look to sectors like pharmaceuticals or healthcare or consulting or law firms, all of these companies are turning to solutions or turning to AlphaSense for the unique, proprietary insight we bring to parts of their business that they can’t get that information anywhere else.
There have been claims that we’re in an unsustainable AI bubble, how confident are you that the technology and sector can continue to grow?
It feels like we are just scratching the surface at AlphaSense. It feels like every month we find new and interesting use cases for AI with different parts of the business, where increasingly it feels like we have gone from research professionals being interested in AlphaSense to anyone doing knowledge work and looking to be smart on what’s going on in their sector also getting value.
We have got over 500 million documents in AlphaSense that powers our AI, but we have also got increasingly more proprietary content, content that is covering and getting into difficult areas that have been hard to learn about in the past, like private markets, and so where we are continuing to invest in proprietary insights that give you knowledge over parts of your business that have been difficult to find in the past, that continued investment there is also unlocking lots of new and exciting opportunities for us to go and help companies.
I think we are very, very early, and I think there is loads more for us to do, and some of the product launches that we have done and the growth that we are seeing is a testament to that opportunity.
