Jack Kokko: How AlphaSense is creating a copilot for market intelligence teams
Layering LLMs, the company is helping investors and businesses do research more thoroughly and faster than humanly possible
Generative AI can also better understand a user’s query. When a user asks a question in natural language, we suddenly know much more about what they’re looking for. We can then find the best results and create a narrative around them, while still staying true to what’s been the core value from day one: giving users trust that they know exactly where each bit of information is coming from. That means finding ways to avoid the pitfalls of LLMs, such as hallucinations. So we’ve been very, very careful to build a system grounded in underlying information that is coming from high-quality, trusted sources.
What’s been the impact of the generative AI work on AlphaSense’s core service?
It’s radically improved, especially with capabilities that we’re in the process of rolling out. We’re adding so much power. Instead of a keyword search, you’re having a conversation with the system that feels like one you’d have with an analyst and you’ve got these LLMs functioning a bit like human brains with high speed and scale. You could debate whether they’re operating at the level of an intern or a junior analyst, but with the guardrails we’ve been able to build, that’s not bad. And then we’re able to scale it to read everything out there and do it at super-high speed. It is really an exponential path of improvement.