Item: AlphaSense
Rating: 9
Author: Tim Beyers

Overall Satisfaction with AlphaSense

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

AlphaSense is used by The Motley Fool's investing team as a research management system. We use the built-in AI to gather insights on conferences, quarterly earnings reports, and material news related to the companies under coverage. We also publish notes in the system to ensure everyone has the latest thinking from covering analysts.

Pros and Cons

Pros

AI summaries of earnings reports are helpful at a high level, but be wary of repetitive content.
AlphaSense handles images and screen captures pretty well, making research notes more useful.
Isolating content is pretty intuitive. Example: I can enter a ticker, and under the content options I can click for "transcripts only" so that I'm not endlessly scrolling to find the transcript I want.
Audio is embedded with most transcripts so it's easy to listen and follow along in the text, highlighting what I need for later reference.

Cons

The AI does a good job of handling one document at a time but often delivers ineffective results if searching for insights over a longer timeframe -- say, a trailing 12 month period.
There's no mechanism for uploading documents. (To be fair, AlphaSense has added a feature for *defining* the documents to which you want to limit your search, which is an improvement.)
There should be a mechanism to add comments inside my own notes. (Think about how you can add a comment to a sentence or paragraph in Word or Google Docs. Sometimes contextual notes are helpful.)

Return on Investment

I don't have a tangible number, but I can say that AlphaSense appears to have been good value as a research management tool. We probably would have spent at least as much as our annual subscription fees to build something a fraction as good.
AlphaSense AI has also been quite useful in that its highly targeted at a set of financial data that I need. The AI is far from perfect -- especially when evaluating a multi-quarter set of data -- but it tends to at least source data I wouldn't find on my own.

Usability

It takes some time to understand AlphaSense's interface. The underlying modules don't necessarily work together. Example: I may be looking at one ticker under document search and then be switched over to an entirely different ticker when switching to the financials module. (The last ticker for which I looked at financial data.) Once you've got the gist, it's pretty easy to get around -- but there is a learning curve.

AlphaSense Market Intelligence

That is an extremely tough question. I'm not sure it has done anything to make us more aware of what's going in our specific market. Nor am I sure that we've gleaned any competitve insights. It's a good tool that helps us work better -- that's the value.

Key Insights

Do you think AlphaSense delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with AlphaSense's feature set?

Yes

Did AlphaSense live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of AlphaSense go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy AlphaSense again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Airtable, Notion, Slack

Likelihood to Recommend

AlphaSense is very well suited to investing teams that need a research management system that has a robust database behind and rich content management features for note-taking. AlphaSense may not be well-suited to individual investors who want data access but don't need to be sharing notes to a wider team. The sharing features are what make AlphaSense most useful.

AlphaSense Feature Ratings

Comments

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AlphaSense A Good RMS For Investment Research