AlphaSense VP: AI Is Reshaping Financial Analysts' Work, Not Replacing Them

Chris Ackerson, senior vice president of product at AlphaSense, said in a September 2026 episode of the "How I Invest" podcast that AI is not eliminating financial professionals but changing how they allocate their time. He cited a large investment bank's multi-month test showing that AlphaSense increased average coverage by 15%, boosting bankers' efficiency after the bank divested some businesses.

Ackerson pointed to accuracy challenges with general-purpose LLMs: a leading AI lab's data released in September 2026 showed error rates between 5% and 9% when using leading market data, which he said is unacceptable for serious investors. In contrast, vertical integration—aggregating, indexing and using AI to read every line of documents—can deliver assessment results three times higher in quality at lower cost, he said.

He emphasized proprietary data as a moat. AlphaSense's expert interview library holds more than 300,000 transcripts and grows by over 25,000 per quarter. The company has built an AI interviewer system that can conduct expert calls at scale and extract quantitative data before earnings releases. Ackerson also said training proprietary search models to call tools precisely can cut costs by up to 40 times while delivering higher-quality results than frontier models.

Looking five years ahead, he predicted financial deliverables will shift from static documents to real-time customized software and an ecosystem of agents, with human judgment remaining decisive.