5 Essential Features of Knowledge Discovery Tools

The quest for knowledge discovery is undoubtedly one of the most prioritized initiatives among investment firms. Under a time crunch to deliver on a deal, there is no worse feeling than not being able to locate a specialized pitch deck or custom-tailored investment thesis previously created by a member of your team, siloed away somewhere in one of your systems.

Even worse, the inability to use your proprietary intelligence can jeopardize potential deals, pose reputational risks, and result in the duplication of work and squandering of resources. The price to pay in these scenarios is too high, and your firm can’t afford to get passed up by your competitors, or lose a crucial placement. 

The C-suite is increasingly prioritizing knowledge sharing and discovery to ensure their firms remain competitive. Identifying the right solution to implement generative AI (genAI) is crucial for firms to gain the most value and remain competitive. 

AlphaSense’s task-based approach to genAI is designed specifically for day-to-day investment research tasks and provides greater accuracy, transparency, and context than most LLMs on the market. 

This best-in-class approach differentiates AlphaSense from other knowledge discovery solutions through: search and summarization capabilities, API integrations, enterprise grade data protection, smart search summaries, and the integration of external and internal content sets. 

Below, we dive into each of these five features, explain their importance, and how each works in AlphaSense.

Search and Summarization Capabilities

Investment firms shopping around for a knowledge discovery solution may quickly encounter challenges and limitations with many products on the market—including unreliable results, lackluster content, or security issues. Often the technology lacks a relevancy algorithm, which is essential to summarization and content generation.

The critical underlying components of search and summarization capabilities include: NLP, sentiment, company recognition, topic & theme recognition, and financial language understanding. AlphaSense’s LLMs and proprietary Large Language Model (ASLLM) are trained on all of these components.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances an LLM’s accuracy and transparency in terms of how a model is sourcing answers. Additionally, RAG brings in contextualized data beyond what it was originally trained on, so it can proactively retrieve a more recent earnings transcript instead of an outdated one, or find snippets in a newly published equity research report. 

The AlphaSense platform, trained on RAG methodology, brings search and summarization capabilities to life for investment teams through:  

• Smart Summaries: Glean instant earnings insights during earnings season, quickly capture company outlook, and generate a SWOT analysis straight from former competitors, partners, and employees. All Summaries provide you with citations to the exact snippets of text from where the summaries are sourced—combining high accuracy with easy verification.
• AlphaSense Assistant: A generative AI chat experience that transforms how users can extract insights from hundreds of millions of premium content sources. Whenever you search for information, Assistant is there to summarize key company events, emerging topics, and industry-wide viewpoints. You can dig deeper into topics by asking Assistant follow-up questions or choosing a suggested query.
• Smart Synonyms™: A unique feature proprietary to AlphaSense with the ability to understand both the keyword and search intent behind any of your queries, factoring in search results that include variations in business language. For example, a search for TAM might also bring back results on market size. 
• Relevancy Algorithm: An advanced algorithm that eliminates noise and surfaces only the most relevant results.  This algorithm saves you precious time and energy, allowing you to get straight to analysis and other high-level tasks.  
• Sentiment Analysis: A natural language processing (NLP)-based feature that parses through content and identifies nuances in the tone and subjective meaning of text. It then uses color coding to help readers identify the document’s positive, negative, and neutral sentiments. 

API Integrations

Through either an AlphaSense-managed solution in our secure cloud or a customer-managed solution in the cloud of your choice, you can easily integrate content at enterprise scale through our Ingestion API or Enterprise-Grade Connectors—like Microsoft 365/Sharepoint, Box, S3, and more. Our Enterprise Intelligence solution supports the upload and management of tens of millions of documents.

AlphaSense’s Ingestion API allows clients to bring in their internal content from any source, index at scale, as well as port over relevant metadata along with their content. In addition to expanding our out-of-the-box connectors, firms have the ability to surface insights across messaging apps and CRM platforms.

Furthermore, AlphaSense’s integration capabilities allow for more streamlined collaboration with members across your organization and improve overall team productivity. Layering AI capabilities on your internal content with customized APIs and connectors delivers insights to your firm almost instantly. Our proprietary AI technology allows you to search across all internal and external company content to find crucial insights, catching what other platforms miss in a secure and automated way.

AlphaSense also offers content processing and content management. Content processing enables company recognition within user documents, while content management features support custom tags and folder structures to better organize internal content.

Enterprise Grade Data Protection

Traditional enterprise search systems may fall short in implementing robust security measures, leaving valuable information vulnerable and out of compliance. Addressing this challenge requires a proactive approach to security in enterprise search solutions. 

AlphaSense customers have uploaded their proprietary content into our platform for many years. Accordingly, protecting and safe-guarding this sensitive information has always been our utmost priority. We ensure that every client’s information is securely stored in isolated object storage buckets like AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) and is encrypted at-rest and in-use. You can read more about our data security and encryption process here.

Our platform leverages an end-to-end encryption of customer information, a zero-trust security model, flexible deployments, and robust entitlement awareness. AlphaSense’s enterprise-grade security infrastructure ensures compliance with global data security standards, including:

• ISO/IEC 27001 certification
• SOC 2 compliant
• Accredited third-party penetration testing
• FIPS 140-2 standard encryption
• SAML 2.0 supported
• Client content automatically encrypted using AES 256
• GDPR compliant

For Enterprise users that operate AWS systems, AlphaSense encrypts customers’ content at rest and in-transit by using AlphaSense keys for encryption. Customer Managed Keys—also referred to as customer-managed encryption or “Bring Your Own Key” (BYOK)—now allows users to retain control over the encryption keys used to encrypt and decrypt their uploaded data or content within AlphaSense’s SaaS platform. 

This means that customers can generate, manage, and revoke encryption keys as needed, providing an additional layer of security and control over their data.

In addition to being available as an AlphaSense-managed solution in our secure cloud, Enterprise Intelligence can also be deployed via a customer-managed private cloud. This may appeal to customers who need to comply with more stringent internal information security policies or controls.

AlphaSense is continuously rolling out data hosting options and encryption mechanisms to offer flexibility in how our customers protect their proprietary content. Combining these new features with our existing network and data transmission security standards positions AlphaSense as a leading provider of secure knowledge discovery capabilities for the modern enterprise.

Generative AI Search Summaries

Powered by generative AI technology, search summaries analyze key information across your company’s integrated content. It produces simple, bulleted lists of the most important insights across a document, topic, or company. All summary bullets are clickable and take you to the exact snippet within a document, presentation, meeting note, or expert call transcript from which the insight was sourced.

Our platform summarizes the 20 most relevant documents for a search, and is sourced from internal documents that are uploaded, emailed in, or integrated through third-party apps or the Ingestion API.

Key benefits of this feature include:

• Discovering what your firm has published/aggregated on a topic
• Decrease time to value in search 
• Allowing a user to get smart on a topic or theme quicker by searching through your internal knowledge
• Provide an easy entry point into relevant documents

In a rapidly changing landscape, being able to quickly and efficiently leverage proprietary intelligence and market insights is essential to capitalize on investment opportunities, position portfolios, and close business development opportunities. Generative AI summaries ensure that you are competitively positioned with your proprietary intelligence.

Integration of External and Internal Content

AlphaSense’s Enterprise Intelligence serves as a secure market intelligence solution that layers AI search and summarization technology onto a consolidated library of both proprietary internal research and premium market intelligence content.

With Enterprise Intelligence, firms can:  

• Upload and index 1TB of documents per day with APIs and third-party connectors  
• Automatically integrate and tag PDFs, SharePoint docs, CIMs, Excel sheets, meeting notes, and more
• Get quick context using genAI summaries with in-line citations—verifiable with one click
• Easily control content access with simple user management and permissioning 

Enterprise Intelligence allows investment teams to enhance the value of their institutional knowledge using AI to search, summarize, and interrogate proprietary internal data alongside a vast repository of 400M+ premium external documents. By centralizing siloed research workflows, teams can make investment decisions faster and with more confidence that they will generate alpha. 

AlphaSense’s platform hosts 10,000+ sources of premium, proprietary, public, and private content sources that you can leverage alongside your internal content, eliminating the need to rely on multiple platforms and increasing the scope of data at your fingertips.

Level Up your Firm’s Knowledge Discovery

For more than a decade, AlphaSense has pioneered end-to-end solutions to solve the knowledge sharing challenges plaguing many investment organizations.

Our platform is designed to help users find insights faster. In order to do that, we offer a number of tools that extend beyond knowledge discovery features to help users accelerate research tasks:  

• Customizable Dashboards create a centralized information hub for monitoring key companies and themes, while tailored real-time alerts provide real-time updates.
• Powerful collaboration tools like Notebook+ and commenting features help teams manage and share insights more effectively.
• Table Tools allow you to streamline your quantitative analysis by enabling you to export modeled time-series data on company financials.
• Image Search allows you to discover insights buried in charts to quickly capture data without reading through pages of documents.
• Snippet Explorer allows you to effortlessly look at any topic or theme and all its historical mentions in a single view.
• Our Black-lining feature allows you to automatically identify any QoQ changes in SEC filings
• Automated Monitoring allows you to set up real-time alerts that send instant updates on any relevant market movements, news, emerging trends, and competitor activities. We also generate snapshots of companies and topics regularly that keep you ahead of the curve with actionable insights.

Unlike most market intelligence platforms, AlphaSense aggregates aftermarket research within our Wall Street Insights® collection. Wall Street Insights® provides access to 1,500+ broker sources for the most relevant insights.

Additionally, our expert transcript library features over 45,000 expert transcripts with proprietary insights from former executives, customers, competitors, and channel participants across a range of industries. Premium insights on thousands of public and private companies can drive confident investment decisions and surface business development opportunities.

AlphaSense’s knowledge discovery features help investment firms to defy doubt and overcome information challenges with best-in-class solutions. Discover how AlphaSense outperforms other knowledge discovery solutions for yourself—try Enterprise Intelligence today.