AI is playing a major part in the future of investor relations as it can deliver 'huge efficiencies,' says a tech CEO

• AI tools can help firms understand market data patterns and draft earnings reports.
• One CEO advises firms to have a clear corporate AI policy and evaluate AI tools for security.

For publicly traded corporations, investor relations involve a number of time-consuming administrative tasks that typically need to be done every quarter — from analyzing data to drafting reports to communicating with shareholders.

"It's really a three-months-long job that repeats four times a year," Darrell Heaps, the founder and CEO of Q4, an artificial-intelligence-driven investor-relations platform based in Toronto, said. Q4 was founded in 2006 and works with about 2,500 companies globally.

To streamline investor-relations tasks, many companies are adopting AI systems. Heaps said automating aspects of investor-relations roles with AI could "save huge amounts of time, several days a quarter," and free up teams to engage with investors and build relationships.

Business Insider spoke with Heaps about how these executives could use AI and ways the technology could humanize the role.

The following has been edited for clarity and length.

How can organizations use AI to streamline investor relations?

In traditional data analysis, AI can help them understand large data patterns in the market, which will help executive IR teams understand the right investors to go after.

With the rise of generative AI, sentiment analysis and summarization of peer press releases and transcripts are some of the core use cases that we're seeing. One of the roles in IR is understanding what's going on in your space, what's going on with your peers, and how analysts are looking at your competitors. AI has been tremendous at being able to summarize and analyze a lot of that content.

These tools also provide a huge amount of efficiency in drafting earnings transcripts and press releases.

How does AI benefit investor-relations teams?

It delivers huge efficiencies in terms of time savings. They can execute more strategically and, ultimately, deliver more value.

Saving time allows IR teams to deep-dive and analyze their shareholder base and understand which investors they want to attract. Being much more strategic at the investor level is absolutely key for IR because, ultimately, the goal of IR is to try to drive a premium valuation against your peers.

How do you believe AI affects the human aspects of IR?

By taking away admin, it frees up individuals to identify and engage with the investors that will make the biggest difference. That's relationship building.

AI allows that human interaction to take place. Without it, IR teams are so buried in admin that they can't actually spend the time to drive those engagements. AI is removing all the things that can be automated. If it can be automated and done better by a machine, let's do that so that we can spend our time fostering those high-quality relationships and, ultimately, delivering a better impact for the company.

What advice do you have for executives for incorporating AI into their IR program?

Have a consistent corporate policy for how you use AI and clarity from a security perspective. This ensures that everyone in the company is not just running rogue and doing their own thing. That's the most important thing we've seen with companies.

Evaluate the tools out there and see if they can serve your niche and what you're looking for. Make sure it's secure.

Be realistic in terms of what areas AI can improve. Where do we really see the biggest impact from a time-saving perspective? That's what narrows it down to specific use cases. You can waste a lot of time and energy versus looking at specific use cases that are going to deliver value to the business and focus your energy there.

Recognize that using AI is a fundamental change to computing. It's not even the future; this is how it's done today. There really are tangible benefits to incorporating AI into your IR program.