S&P Global Market Intelligence has issued a tranche of new data applications, among the first to be developed under its S&P Capital IQ Pro Labs within the S&P Capital IQ Pro platform, a web-based environment in which clients can access – and offer feedback on – development versions of artificial intelligence-supported tools.
The three solutions, which are geared towards surfacing analyses from a handful of S&P Global’s data sets, herald a new way in which the data and ratings company is creating new ways for clients to interact with its data. By engaging directly with the organisations most likely to use the products, S&P Global hopes it can forge robust new applications. Once proven in the Labs research and development environment, the tools can be embedded within S&P Global Capital IQ Pro’s platform, said Justine Iverson, head of analytics for Capital IQ Solutions.
“We’re constantly looking to evolve the platform and this is a great way for us to iterate how we can use our great content and display it in different visual ways to help our users with their workflow,” Iverson told Data Management Insight. “One of the big drivers is that with the advancement of technology, which is moving so quickly as are our client needs, Labs allows us to really innovate with speed and relevance.”
Multiple Models
The new interactive visual applications developed in Labs use AI to identify trending topics in earnings call transcripts; to pull company and sector sentiment signals from news sources; and, to find key themes from significant phrases used in transcriptions and reports.
The S&P Capital IQ Pro applications enable users to query the company’s datasets using a variety of third-party AI and large language models (LLMs) “because we understand that different models are better for different functions”, she added. There are no plans yet to let firms query their own data within the applications and access so far is limited to data specific to each application’s tasks.
Users can interact with the under-development innovations via the “Labs” tab within the S&P Capital IQ Pro platform, from which they can also send feedback.
Lower Risk
As AI transforms data management, many companies are hurtling headlong into building applications without planning or without a credible use case for the technology. Research form Gartner has predicted that almost a third of all AI proofs of concept across the economy will be abandoned due to a range of factors, but most prominently because of poor data quality, weak risk controls and a lack of clarity about the project’s business value.
Iverson said S&P Global has recognised this. The absence of a strong use case to drive AI application development has been the cause of many surrendered projects, she said. Once companies have surmounted that hurdle, she added, S&P Global can ensure that data concerns are assuaged.
“After finding the right use case, the next question companies must ask is do they have the right data, is it organised in a way that it can be successfully used,” she said. “There’s a couple of pain points we’ve seen across the industry that we’re helping to solve for our clients.”
Saved Time
Iverson said that the new products will help clients make better use of their resources by surfacing insights that would ordinarily have been obtained over time using spreadsheets and other less automated processes.
She illustrates her point with reference to the earnings call transcriptions tool, which can save company analysts having to read through entire reports to mine insights. Instead, the transcriptions can be queried through AI to find themes within the text.
“AI really comes into play here is because it’s able to contextualise and understand that those trends are all related, so that you can get a nice view of key themes across that earnings call,” Iverson said.
Within the Labs environment S&P Global takes client feedback and, where applicable, integrates it back into the application.
Expansion Plans
The firm sees exploitation of its datasets, more so than creation of new functionality, as a driver for developing new applications within Labs. One already in the works draws on multiple S&P Global datasets to value companies across a range of different methods and factors. This is another process that is often executed at great expense in spreadsheets and manual workflows.
“Company valuation is a very common workflow for many of our clients, so we’re working to support that in a different way with more modern technologies,” said Iverson. “That’s a great example of how we will continue to build out these applications, based again on client feedback, where we see trends moving in the market.”
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