Top Generative AI Tools for Market Research (Buyer’s Guide)

The future of market research is in generative artificial intelligence (genAI). 

Organizations across all industries are adopting generative AI at a rapid pace; 80% of all organizations have increased their investment in genAI from last year. This branch of artificial intelligence has ushered in waves of change in the healthcare, energy, financial services, and consulting sectors, among others. 

One of the most transformative applications of genAI across all these industries, and others, has been in the form of market research.

This technology has enabled companies to penetrate new markets, identify untapped customer bases, analyze consumer behavior, and develop strategic initiatives—all in a fraction of the time and with greater confidence than was previously possible. 

However, the use of generative AI solutions in market research is not without risk. First, if the technology is not trained on accurate professional content, it becomes impossible to separate fact from fiction or extract workable insights. Secondly, not all generative AI models are designed for financial and business intelligence needs, raising serious concerns about security and data privacy, as well as trustworthiness of information generated. 

In this guide, we cover some of the top genAI tools for market research, diving into their features, strengths and weaknesses, and pricing. We also discuss how you can choose the right tool for your business needs and the specific attributes to look for in order to maximize the value you get out of generative AI.

Purpose-Built Market Intelligence Tools

Market intelligence tools that integrate generative AI have the advantage of being purpose-built for business and financial research. Unlike consumer-grade generative AI tools, market intelligence platforms have access to premium and proprietary business information sources that are critical for informing investment and strategic decisions. These platforms have thousands of corporations and financial firms as customers, as well as many years of experience working with security-conscious enterprise firms. 

However, many of these platforms have antiquated UIs and are typically slow to innovate, making them less competitive than newer players. The exception here is AlphaSense, an AI-driven platform with generative AI that is specifically trained to understand business and financial language and context. And while legacy players are traditionally less adept at qualitative research, AlphaSense is one of the leading qualitative market research tools available today.

We will discuss:

• AlphaSense
• Bloomberg

AlphaSense

Best for: Holistic and comprehensive genAI-driven market intelligence, combining premium external content sources with internal enterprise knowledge

AlphaSense is a secure, end-to-end market intelligence platform powered by 10+ years of AI development. It’s purpose-built for business and financial professionals looking to centralize their proprietary internal content alongside an out-of-the-box collection of 300M+ premium external documents—with the goal of increasing team productivity and collaboration.

Consistently ranked as an industry leader by TrustRadius and G2, AlphaSense was also recognized by Forbes as a top 50 AI company in 2023. 

Here’s how AlphaSense enables you to extract insights and answers from both high-value internal and external content with the power of artificial intelligence and generative AI—all on a single platform. 

Features and Capabilities

Extensive Out-of-the-Box Content Library

AlphaSense allows you to combine valuable internal content with our out-of-the-box content library that includes earnings transcripts and other company documents, SEC and global filings, trade journals, news, and regulatory documents. AlphaSense users also have access to two premium and proprietary content offerings. These are:

• Wall Street Insights® – A collection of broker research from Wall Street’s leading firms, covering global sector themes, industries, and companies from 1,000+ sell-side and independent firms, available within the AlphaSense platform. Research professionals can even preview the contents of a broker report, saving them wasted time and money on potentially fruitless research.

• Expert Transcript Library – Tens of thousands of one-on-one call transcripts with industry experts, competitors, customers, professionals, and former and current executives, with the ability to conduct your own 1:1 expert calls for less.

In addition to these sources, you can upload and search through your own content, such as:

• Internal research, notes, and presentations
• Investment memos
• Reports from industry and market intelligence providers
• Newsletters, web pages, and RSS feeds

AI Search & Summarization Technology

Our industry-leading suite of generative AI tools is purpose-built to deliver business-grade insights, leaning on 10+ years of AI tech development. This includes our RAG approach and our proprietary AlphaSense Large Language Model (ASLLM)—trained specifically on business and financial data—which matches or beats the leading third-party LLMs over 90% of the time. 

Our suite of tools currently includes:

Smart Summaries

This feature allows you to glean instant earnings insights (reducing time spent on research during earnings season), quickly capture company outlook, and generate an expert-approved 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. We also apply this same technology to our collection of expert calls. 

Generative Search

Our generative AI chat experience transforms how users can extract insights from hundreds of millions of premium content sources. Our chatbot is trained to think like an analyst, so it understands the market research intent behind your natural language queries. Whenever you search for information, generative AI is there to summarize key company events, emerging topics, and industry-wide viewpoints. You can dig deeper into topics by asking follow-up questions or choosing a suggested query.

Smart Synonyms™

This unique feature is proprietary to AlphaSense and has 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” will also bring back results on “market size.” 

Relevancy Algorithm

AlphaSense’s advanced algorithm also eliminates noise (i.e., content with matching keywords but ultimately irrelevant to your specific search objective) 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

Sentiment Analysis, a natural language processing (NLP)-based feature, 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. 

This technology assigns each search term a numerical sentiment change score to help users track any slight change in market sentiments across time. Users can take advantage of it to make better-informed investment decisions and improve risk management strategies. 

Integration Capabilities

Customers can easily integrate content at enterprise scale through our Ingestion API or Enterprise-Grade Connectors—like Microsoft 365/Sharepoint, Box, S3, and more. Enterprise Intelligence supports the upload and management of tens of millions of documents.

Our integration capabilities allow for more streamlined collaboration with members across your organization and improve overall team productivity. 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 allows company recognition within user documents, while content management features support custom tags and folder structures to better organize internal content.

The ability to integrate and search your internal content is available through either an AlphaSense-managed solution in our secure cloud or a customer-managed solution in the cloud of your choice (a.k.a. Private Cloud), as well as optional Customer Managed Keys to keep your data secure and compliant.

Monitoring, Analysis, and Collaboration Tools

AlphaSense is designed to help users find insights faster. In order to do that, we offer a number of tools that extend beyond search and summarization to help users accelerate research tasks.  

• Customizable dashboards create a centralized information hub for monitoring key companies and themes, while tailored 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 move faster with spreadsheet-style visualizations directly from company filings, so you can chain together, edit, and optimize tables for analysis. 
• 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.

AlphaSense Strengths

• All-in-one research platform
• Ability to access and compare multiple key market perspectives, including broker research, expert calls, company documents, news, regulatory sites, as well as your own internal research
• AI is trained on business and financial data and is trained to understand variations in business language, leading to fewer inaccuracies or hallucinations
• Every answer is backed up with citations, down to the exact snippet
• Generative AI features, like Smart Summaries for earnings, expert calls, and broker reports
• Automated and customizable alerts
• User-friendly interface
• Internal note-taking, sharing and collaboration features
• Support for APIs and integrations
• Supports enterprise-level organizations and teams
• Enterprise-grade data production complying with global security standards: SOC2, ISO270001, FIPS 140-2, SAML 2.0
• Excellent customer support team, including 24/5 chat with product specialists, a live Help button on the website, and regular live AlphaSense Education webinars

AlphaSense Weaknesses

• Visualization tools are limited at this time
• Collaboration tools are limited to users with AlphaSense licenses

Pricing

Subscription prices vary based on the number of users (for small- and medium-sized companies) and are customized based on the organization (enterprise or company level subscription packages). Contact the AlphaSense team to learn more, or start a free 2-week trial here.

Bloomberg

Best for: Real-time financial data and market analytics, with in-depth industry reports

Bloomberg Terminal is one of the oldest and most widely used market research and analysis tools in the financial services industry. Launched in 1981—well before individual computers or the internet were common at firms—Bloomberg led the way in democratizing access to financial market data. 

Since then, Bloomberg has become one of the highest-rated market research tools giving users access to unique market data, news, and insights, enabling professionals to turn intelligence into a competitive advantage.  

However, as a legacy solution, Bloomberg has struggled in recent years to keep up with modern research needs. Though they have traditionally been slow to adopt new technologies such as AI, it’s become increasingly apparent that competition is fierce, fast-moving, and highly adept with technology. In order to stay competitive, Bloomberg has slowly adopted genAI capabilities, though their lack of experience in the space is clear. Compared to competitors with years of experience developing an AI tech stack, Bloomberg struggles with clunky UI, limited functionality, and an over-reliance on third-party tech.  

Still, Bloomberg Terminal is a powerful research insights tool that has some top-notch features for financial research.

Related Reading: Bloomberg Terminal Alternatives

Features and Capabilities

Real-Time Data

Bloomberg Terminal offers access to real-time financial market data, stock prices, bonds, commodities, currencies, and derivatives. They also offer real-time news coverage of companies, industries, and markets worldwide, along with real-time alerts on significant market events. Finally, Bloomberg provides access to equity research reports from leading analysts, a highly valuable content set that most competitors cannot offer.

Analytics and Modeling Tools

Bloomberg Terminal offers advanced charting, financial modeling, and analytics for equities, fixed income, and commodities. There are also risk analytics, asset allocation, and portfolio optimization tools available for asset managers and financial professionals.

Trading Platform

Bloomberg offers a complete trading solution, bringing together pricing, analytics, liquidity, automation, and execution in one place.

Generative AI

Bloomberg recently made its foray into generative AI with its BloombergGPT large language model (LLM), which is purpose-built for finance and is trained on a vast range of financial data. Their model is safeguarded against hallucination since all genAI responses must be grounded in Bloomberg content. However, it is not clear how the LLM interprets and handles queries.

Bloomberg Strengths

• Proprietary news, research and analytics from internal and external sources
• Tools for internal collaboration opportunities
• Market execution and order management tools 
• Access to traditional markets and other asset classes
• Custom charts, monitors, and alerts for market information
• Limited generative AI functionality, purpose-built for finance
• Integrated platform for trading and executing orders across multiple asset classes

Bloomberg Weaknesses

• An expensive option, costing about $2000 a month
• A steep learning curve for new users
• No sentiment analysis or synonym recognition
• No expert calls and transcripts
• Lack of broker research access for corporates
• Cannot ingest internal content
• Lack of transparency around how the LLM interprets and handles queries

Pricing

Bloomberg Terminal is one of the higher-priced options in the market, with subscription fees at $2000 per month—or $24K annually—well outside the reach of many small or mid-sized firms. Bloomberg also bundles multiple services into its product, making it clunky and complex for the average user. Its highly technical user interface is ideal for financial services professionals, but is less user-friendly for corporate users, and there is a steep learning curve for new users. 

Consumer-Grade Tools 

This is the only tier of genAI tools that contains low-budget or even free options. These tools are well-suited to individual consumer needs, such as automating repetitive tasks, summarizing large volumes of information, or getting quick answers to internet search queries. However, these tools are severely limited in their ability to support holistic, comprehensive market research, particularly for enterprise organizations or investors. This is because they lack built-in data governance mechanisms and are also not trained on business-grade data. Most of these tools also set limits on usage.

We will discuss:

• ChatGPT
• Perplexity
• Gemini

ChatGPT

Best for: Getting high-level publicly available information on a company or industry, brainstorming ideas, writing first drafts based on specific prompts

This is the platform that set off the generative AI boom in 2022, as it democratized genAI and showed users the power of this technology for everything from answering questions and summarizing large volumes of information, to more complex tasks like data analysis and content creation.

ChatGPT is intended to assist users in automating and improving tasks that rely heavily on text-based information. It can also be used for internal communication support, such as generating emails, creating presentations, and answering frequently asked questions within an organization. The platform is widely used for customer support automation, responding to queries with high accuracy and speed.

Though it has some business-grade applications, ChatGPT is first and foremost a consumer-grade tool. It lacks the data protection and security features that would make it safe to use for an enterprise organization, and because it is trained on publicly available web data, it is highly prone to hallucination and inaccuracy.

Features and Capabilities

Natural Language Understanding

ChatGPT excels at processing and understanding natural language, allowing users to input complex queries in plain English. This makes it easy for users to gather insights from highly complex and unstructured data sets without needing to know specific technical commands. 

Content Generation

One of ChatGPT’s key capabilities is its ability to generate human-like text, which can be applied to drafting reports, summaries, and even high-level market analysis. This feature helps reduce the time spent on routine writing tasks, freeing up resources for higher-level strategic and analytical work.

Data Summarization

ChatGPT can quickly summarize large amounts of information, making it ideal for condensing lengthy reports, news articles, or financial filings into key takeaways. This helps users extract the most relevant insights without having to sift through large volumes of data manually.

Conversational Interface

The platform provides a conversational interface, allowing users to ask follow-up questions, refine queries, and interactively explore datasets. This makes it more intuitive and user-friendly compared to traditional data tools, enabling faster and more flexible research.

Integration with External Data Sources

ChatGPT Enterprise (the premium version of ChatGPT) can be integrated with various external systems and databases, allowing users to pull in real-time data or access specific datasets for analysis. This capability is crucial if users are needing to ensure accuracy in the answers they receive. However, ChatGPT and ChatGPT Plus lack this capability.

ChatGPT Strengths

• Able to process large amounts of information in seconds
• Versatile use cases across wide range of text-based tasks
• Well-financed, which is driving rapid innovation
• Has a free tier, which makes it highly accessible to individuals and small businesses
• Highly intuitive user experience with no learning curve
• Able to generate images, tables, and charts via natural language prompts

ChatGPT Weaknesses

• Trained on publicly available data, rather than business or financial data
• No access to real-time data unless integrated with third-party sources
• Relies on pre-existing data, so output is only as good as the data it was trained on
• No guardrails in place to protect against hallucination or inaccurate information
• Lack of transparency around how the model interprets and handles queries
• Lack of domain-specific expertise in highly technical areas
• No guardrails against security or data breaches

Pricing

ChatGPT is widely known as a free resource, but it actually has several pricing tiers, depending on your specific usage needs. The free tier is ideal for casual use and light tasks, and it’s limited in the number of queries users can make per day, speed of generation, and contextual understanding.

The next tier is ChatGPT Plus, which is $20 per month and provides access to GPT-4, a more advanced model than the free GPT-3.5. This tier offers faster response times, priority access during high-demand periods, and improved performance for complex tasks.

Finally, ChatGPT has an Enterprise tier for enterprise organizations, the pricing of which varies based on company needs.  

Perplexity

Best for: Quick and precise answers sourced from external publicly available references

Perplexity is an advanced generative AI tool designed to assist users in extracting and synthesizing information from various sources. Its primary purpose is to streamline the research process by generating detailed, contextually relevant responses to complex queries. The platform leverages sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) techniques to understand and analyze vast amounts of text data, making it an invaluable asset for professionals who need to quickly gather and interpret information.

Features and Capabilities

Natural Language Search

Perplexity allows users to input queries in natural language and receive detailed, accurate responses. This makes it easy for users to gather insights from highly complex and unstructured data sets without needing to know specific technical commands.

Real-Time Web Results

Perplexity provides real-time data from the web, ensuring users have access to the most current information available. This is especially useful for research or queries that are more timely or that are likely to change on a frequent basis. 

Source Attribution

One of Perplexity’s strengths is its ability to provide clear source attribution for its answers. This feature allows researchers to verify the accuracy of the information and trace it back to original sources, adding a layer of reliability to market research findings. However, Perplexity is not able to link to exact snippets of information in the sources.

Quick Summaries

Perplexity offers the ability to summarize large volumes of information quickly, which helps users save time and can turn complex datasets into digestible insights. 

Conversational AI Interface

Perplexity operates through a conversational AI interface, enabling users to ask follow-up questions and refine their queries. This interactive capability makes it easier to dig deeper into research topics and uncover more specific insights during the research process.

Perplexity Strengths

• Utilizes real-time data from the web in its answers, ensuring relevant and timely responses
• Handles complex queries and generates responses that are contextually rich and highly relevant
• Great at integrating diverse data sources
• Cites source documents for generated responses, though does not cite snippets
• Can analyze and extract insights from an uploaded document
• Ability to create charts and tables summarizing data

Perplexity Weaknesses

• Trained on publicly available data, rather than business-grade or financial data
• Output is only as good as the data the model is trained on, so hallucination and inaccuracy are possible
• The tool struggles with highly complex or technical queries, leading to longer response times and incomplete answers

Pricing

Like ChatGPT, Perplexity offers several different pricing tiers meant to fit different user needs. Their lowest-priced tier, for around $10-20 per month, is designed for individual users or small teams who need occasional access to advanced genAI features for personal research or small-scale projects. This tier is ideal for users who primarily require general information retrieval and basic synthesis capabilities without extensive customization.

The next tier is the Professional tier, priced at roughly $50-100 per month, and is designed for mid-sized businesses and professionals who need more frequent access to the genAI tool. This tier is a good fit for users who require more robust features, such as enhanced data integration, advanced query handling, and higher usage limits.

Finally, Perplexity offers an Enterprise tier for around $200-500 per month, and this tier is meant for large organizations and corporations that require extensive usage, custom integrations, and dedicated support. This tier offers the most advanced features, including priority customer service, custom API integrations, and enhanced data security.

Gemini

Best for: Leveraging Google’s AI for real-time market insights and data synthesis

Gemini, previously known as Bard, is a cutting-edge generative AI tool developed by Google, designed to provide advanced natural language processing and understanding. Its primary function is to generate and interpret text-based information from Google search results with high accuracy, making it a valuable resource for various applications. Gemini integrates Google’s extensive data and AI research capabilities to offer users a powerful tool for detailed information analysis and synthesis.

Features and Capabilities

Advanced Natural Language Processing

Gemini leverages state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) techniques to understand and generate text with high accuracy. Its models are trained on vast amounts of data, allowing it to handle complex queries and provide contextually relevant responses. 

Comprehensive Data Access

As part of Google DeepMind’s suite, Gemini benefits from extensive access to Google’s vast information ecosystem. This broad data integration enables Gemini to analyze and generate insights from a wide range of sources, ensuring that the information it provides is both current and comprehensive. This feature is particularly valuable for generating reports and summaries based on diverse datasets.

Integration with Google Ecosystem

Gemini’s integration with Google’s ecosystem provides seamless compatibility with other Google tools and services. This feature facilitates efficient workflows and data management, particularly for users already utilizing Google’s suite of productivity and analytical tools. 

Gemini Strengths

• Deep integration with Google’s vast information ecosystem
• Advanced NLP that handles complex queries with nuanced understanding
• Continuously being updated and improved
• Able to generate documents, emails, and presentations via natural language processing
• Can summarize and analyze single documents
• Cites source documents

Gemini Weaknesses

• LLM is only trained on public web data and Google Workspace content, not on business-grade or financial data
• Output is only as good as the quality of data it’s trained on
• Less accessible than other tools, since it’s part of Google and thus may be less flexible in terms of integration with other platforms
• Internal content is limited to Google Workspace
• Susceptible to inaccuracy, though some guardrails against hallucination exist 
• Does not link to specific snippets when citing sources
• Lack of transparency around how the model interprets and handles queries
• Several high-profile cases of security breaches when using this tool

Pricing

Gemini has two pricing tiers. The lower tier is called Gemini Business and is priced at $20 per user per month. This includes integration with various Google apps, as well as enterprise-grade security and privacy.

The higher tier is called Gemini Enterprise and is priced at $30 per user per month, with a mandatory commitment for a year. This includes advanced meetings with AI note-taking and translated captions in over 65 languages, as well as even more enhanced security and protection measures.

Gemini also offers a free 14-day trial for anyone wanting to try the tool before committing to payment.

Knowledge Discovery Tools

Unlike the consumer-grade tools listed above, the tools in this section are designed specifically for enterprise organizations, though some tools have options for individual use. They excel at retrieving insights across unstructured proprietary data, helping organizations manage and discover the knowledge they already own. However, these tools are limited in their ability to deliver external business-grade insights specific to business and financial market research questions.

We will discuss:

• Copilot
• Glean
• Hebbia

Copilot

Best for: Integrating AI into business workflows with Microsoft applications

Copilot is Microsoft’s genAI-powered tool that seamlessly integrates into Microsoft 365 applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It is designed to enhance productivity for professionals who already rely on Microsoft 365, by offering advanced natural language processing and contextual assistance. 

Copilot is suitable for individuals or businesses, with the latter version offering enhanced data protection and collaboration capabilities. 

Features and Capabilities

Natural Language Processing for Document Creation

Copilot uses advanced natural language processing (NLP) to assist with content creation and editing. Users can describe the content they want in plain language, and Copilot can generate text, suggest improvements, and provide writing prompts. This feature is particularly useful for drafting reports, creating presentations, and composing emails.

Data Insights and Analysis

In Excel, Copilot leverages AI to analyze data and generate insights. It can create charts, summarize data trends, and even suggest formulas based on the user’s needs. This capability helps users make data-driven decisions more efficiently by providing actionable insights and simplifying complex data analysis tasks.

Automated Design Suggestions

For PowerPoint, Copilot offers automated design suggestions based on the content being created. It can recommend layouts, styles, and visual elements that enhance the presentation’s effectiveness. This feature streamlines the design process and ensures that presentations are both visually appealing and aligned with the content.

Context-Aware Assistance

Copilot provides context-aware assistance across Microsoft 365 applications. By understanding the current task and context, it delivers relevant suggestions and automations that are tailored to the user’s immediate needs. This feature enhances productivity for any Microsoft user by offering timely and accurate support.

Copilot also integrates with Microsoft Graph, allowing it to access and analyze data across various Microsoft services. This allows Copilot to provide more personalized and contextually relevant assistance by leveraging data from emails, calendars, and other sources within the Microsoft ecosystem.

Enhanced Collaboration

In collaborative environments, Copilot supports team efforts by facilitating shared document editing and providing collective insights. It helps streamline communication and collaboration by offering tools that assist in real-time content creation and project management.

Copilot Strengths

• Seamless integration with Microsoft 365, which is helpful for users who primarily work in Microsoft
• Can generate images, presentations, and documents via NLP
• Can summarize and analyze single documents
• Robust compliance and end-to-end data security

Copilot Weaknesses

• Data sources are limited to internal content, with potential to use a plugin to access web data; no premium or proprietary external content
• Limited by its reliance on the Microsoft ecosystem, restricting functionality for users who work with non-Microsoft tools
• Many customers complain about hallucinations 
• No citation capabilities mentioned 

Pricing

Copilot offers several pricing tiers, depending on specific user needs. Their free tier is best suited for individual consumers and includes chat, summarization, and image creation abilities. Commercial data protection can also be enabled.

The next tier is Copilot Pro, priced at $20 per month, and it comes with faster responses during peak times, integration with certain Microsoft 365 apps, and faster AI image creation.

The final tier is $30 per user per month. This is the only version designed for enterprise use and includes everything the aforementioned tiers have, in addition to integration with all Microsoft 365 apps and Microsoft Teams, enterprise-grade data protection, Microsoft Graph grounding, and customization and extensibility through the Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Glean

Best for: Efficiently searching for and extracting insights from internal company documents—most relevant for marketing, HR, IT, engineering, sales and support teams.

Glean is an enterprise search and knowledge discovery tool for modern professionals. Founded in 2020 by a team of former Google engineers and industry veterans, Glean’s goal is to help teams more efficiently access and utilize their internal knowledge and data, ultimately improving productivity and knowledge sharing within the organization.

As an enterprise search platform, Glean enables organizations to search across various data sources within their internal systems—including documents, emails, databases, collaboration tools, and more. Customers refer to Glean as “Google for the internal workspace,” citing the powerful and customizable search functionality that helps find any topic, project, or technology at work.

In 2023, Glean launched a new suite of generative AI tools—based on their proprietary knowledge model—aiming to improve the accuracy and security of enterprise data and content, as well as enhance productivity and collaboration among teams.

Features and Capabilities

Glean Assistant

Referred to as “ChatGPT for your enterprise,” this is a digital workplace assistant that can be used for engineering, sales, support, and other queries—pulling answers directly from internal company resources. Assistant also configures with Slack, so that Glean can answer questions raised in Slack channels.

AI Answers

This is an NLP-based feature that draws from various sources of content, context, and permissions within an organization’s knowledge base to provide a single, concise answer to any query.

Company Knowledge and Context

For each company, Glean creates an enterprise knowledge graph, which understands all the content, people, and activity in an organization, as well as how each piece of information relates to one another. This allows Glean to understand each organization’s unique internal language and the specific collaborative relationships between workers. This is also how Glean’s expert detection feature works, wherein they identify and connect users with subject matter experts within their own organization, based on Glean’s analysis of content, activity, and relationships.

Permissions and Data Governance

Glean is committed to complying with all real-time enterprise data permissions and governance rules. This means the platform ensures that each user only has access to information they are allowed to access. 

Full Referenceability

Unlike models operating in black-box environments, Glean prioritizes transparency, ensuring that users always know exactly where each piece of information is coming from, as well as who is responsible for it. 

Related Reading: Best Enterprise Search Software in 2024 (Buyer’s Guide)

Glean Strengths

• Strong tool for searching and discovering any internal company information
• Powerful search functionality with limited filtering capabilities
• Generative AI features that make search faster, easier, and more precise
• Includes guardrails to protect against hallucination
• Will cite and link to all source documents
• Great collaboration and knowledge sharing features
• Offers 100+ integrations including Slack, Box, Google Drive, OneDrive, and Sharepoint
• Robust compliance and end-to-end data security

Glean Weaknesses

• Limited to only internal content; no premium external content sets available
• Relatively new in the market; product is still developing and learning
• Not built for market research workflows
• Search capabilities are limited in terms of phrase matching and keyword proximity
• Relevancy score can be inaccurate, leading to sifting through irrelevant search results 
• Limited customization options, which may not be ideal for teams with unique needs
• No ability to set up customizable alerts
• Lack of transparency around how the genAI model interprets and handles queries

Pricing

Glean does not publicly disclose pricing information. To obtain details about their pricing or to request a demo, contact their team.

Hebbia

Best for: Deep analysis and extracting insights from large unstructured datasets

Hebbia is a search engine and large-language model productivity tool. It was founded in 2020 by George Sivulka, raising over $30M across three financing rounds. Powered by AI and machine learning, Hebbia generates valuable insights from public and private content through a combination of chat-style search and generative AI. Companies and professionals rely on Hebbia to streamline and automate their research and due diligence processes, without compromising on accuracy. 

Features and Capabilities

Advanced Search Engine

Hebbia offers an advanced search engine that uses AI to delve into unstructured data across documents, emails, and databases. It allows users to input natural language queries to find relevant information quickly, making it easier to locate critical insights hidden within large data sets.

Document Understanding

Hebbia’s AI models are capable of deep document understanding, enabling users to extract and summarize information from lengthy reports, research papers, and other text-heavy sources. This feature reduces the time spent reading through documents by providing concise summaries of key points.

Intelligent Indexing

The tool automatically indexes documents and data, organizing information in a way that makes it easily searchable and accessible. This intelligent indexing allows users to structure unorganized data sources, enhancing their ability to retrieve relevant information efficiently.

Customizable AI Models

Hebbia provides customizable AI models that can be tailored to specific industry needs or business requirements. Users can adjust the AI to focus on particular keywords, topics, or types of data, ensuring that the tool delivers the most relevant insights for their specific use cases.

Seamless Integration

Hebbia integrates seamlessly with existing workflows and tools, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems, cloud storage solutions, and other enterprise software. This integration allows users to incorporate Hebbia’s capabilities into their current processes without disrupting their workflow.

Interactive Data Visualization

The tool offers interactive data visualization features that help users better understand complex data sets. By presenting information in charts, graphs, and other visual formats, Hebbia enables users to identify patterns, trends, and insights more easily.

Hebbia Strengths

• Able to summarize individual documents
• Can index any document of any type, via portal or API
• Features intelligent semantic search
• Full transparency about how genAI model interprets and handles queries
• Pre-indexes company filings and research
• Supports uploads of private company data
• Offers a full suite of collaborative tools and access controls
• Features end-to-end encryption and robust compliance

Hebbia Weaknesses

• Relatively new in the market; product is still developing and learning
• Limited to internal content and public external content; no premium or proprietary external sources such as broker research or expert calls
• Must import data from external sources
• Cites sources but does not link to exact snippets
• Lack of transparency around guardrails against genAI hallucination
• Lacks sentiment analysis features
• No company insights, snapshots, or tearsheets
• Integrations for internal content are possible, but users complain about bugginess

Pricing

Hebbia does not publicly disclose its pricing information. For more details on pricing or to book a demo, reach out to Hebbia directly.

Emerging Startup Tools

While many genAI tools are low-cost or free, they often lack critical context and capabilities to serve more than a few specific use cases. Many of these tools are helpful for analysis of earnings or SEC documents, but they are limited in their productivity potential across other workstreams. Additionally, the young age of these startups means they have less experience building out AI tech, which can lead to half-baked releases that rely heavily on third-party tools. 

We will discuss:

• Aiera
• Fintool
• FinChat

Aiera

Best for: Tracking and analyzing earnings calls, corporate events, and news for investment insights

Aiera is an event and financial intelligence platform that offers coverage of investor events and live earnings calls. It provides live and instant access to earning calls, with real-time transcription and audio streaming, as well as news for investment insights. It also features indicators that give users access to past and present financial statements, events, and financial disclosures. However, this platform misses market context, as it does not provide access to critical market research content, such as analyst reports and expert call transcripts.

Features and Capabilities

Live Event Streaming

With this dashboard event, Aiera gives you instant access to live video and audio investor events. With one click, you can watch, pause, rewind or speed up investor calls. Additionally, you can stream multiple live investor calls and transcribe them simultaneously. This way, you get the best takeaways from all calls at the same time.

Real-Time Transcription

Aiera uses a state-of-the-art transcription system that converts speech to text with almost no delay. You can also read and search through the call transcript, jumping to sections marked by your chosen keywords. These transcripts also help you stay ahead of potential market moves as investor calls are happening.

Search

From Aiera’s dashboard, you can search for key terms and find them across multiple documents and transcripts. You can also save search terms and track them over time or get real-time alerts on all new keyword mentions in new transcripts.

AI-Powered Analysis

Aiera’s AI tools summarize event transcripts as soon as a call ends. Aiera’s AI also generates key event themes and extracts key topics to consider. You can convert these insights into notes, share them across your organization, and export them to PDF or Word documents.

Market Monitoring

Aiera helps you monitor the market by keeping you updated on all events, news, company filings and actions of big corporations. You can also set real time alerts on any trending topics and upcoming events. 

Custom Transcriptions

Aiera enables you to transcribe personal meetings and calls. Using its Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, Aiera can generate meeting transcripts, which you can share with colleagues and team members. These transcripts can also be uploaded for compliance. 

Aiera Strengths

• Live access to earning calls and investor events
• Live speech-to-text transcriptions
• Uses NLP technology to enhance transcript accuracy
• Deep search functionality
• AI-powered transcript and document analysis
• Supports adding internal calls and documents for analysis

Aiera Weaknesses

• Lacks expert calls and broker research, leading to an incomplete market research picture
• No AI-powered search feature
• Newer on the market so research libraries are more sparse and less diverse than some peers’ 
• Strong bias to earnings and investor calls with less emphasis on other intelligence sources

Pricing

Aiera does not publicly disclose its pricing information. You can find more details on their pricing page, or request a demo.

Fintool

Best for: Using AI to automate financial research and uncover deeper insights from financial documents

Fintool is a generative AI tool designed specifically for financial professionals, such as analysts, portfolio managers, and investors. In their own words, Fintool is engineered to discover financial insights beyond the reach of timely human analysis. 

Fintool uses advanced machine learning algorithms to process and interpret SEC filings and earnings transcripts, helping users make informed investment decisions with real-time data analysis and risk assessment. However, since it only works for the use case of earnings analysis, Fintool is limited in its utility for holistic market research.

Features and Capabilities

Conversational Interface

The platform provides a conversational interface, where users can ask natural language questions about SEC filings, earnings calls, and conference transcripts. The tool responds with citations to all sources used and also suggests follow-up questions.

Data Extraction in Tabular Format

Fintool organizes financial metrics, KPIs, and unstructured data from filings and transcripts into easy-to-use tables, which can then be exported in CSV form. Users can customize these tables with natural language prompts.

Real-Time Alerts

Fintool reads thousands of filings in the background and can notify users of specific relevant updates on a real-time basis. 

Internal Data Upload

Fintool allows users to upload their own internal data into the tool, with enterprise-grade security. Fintool seamlessly integrates with cloud providers to help users discover and leverage their internal content more effectively.

Fintool Strengths

• Provides access to SEC filings and earnings transcripts
• Excels at automating routine tasks such as report generation and updating financial models
• Allows users to upload their internal data; platform integrates with cloud providers
• Quickly analyzes complex financial data and generates actionable insights
• Cites exact snippets of source documents in generated responses
• Tabular interface for company screening using the user’s own criteria
• AI-powered table generation via natural language prompts
• Robust compliance and data security

Fintool Weaknesses

• No content sources outside filings and earnings transcripts
• Lack of premium proprietary content sources, like broker research or expert calls
• Learning curve for users unfamiliar with AI
• Potential limitations in handling specific or niche financial queries that require deep human expertise
• No specific guardrails against hallucination
• No integrations
• Lack of transparency around how the model interprets and handles queries
• No LLM verticalization, though customized for investor workflows
• Cannot ingest internal content

Pricing

Fintool offers two pricing plans, one for small to medium-sized businesses, and the other for enterprise organizations. They do not disclose specific pricing for either, so you will need to contact them directly for more information. 

FinChat

Best for: AI-generated charts and models, as well as limited financial data, for financial analysis

FinChat is an AI-powered investment research platform combining institutional-grade financial data, analytics, and conversational AI. FinChat only offers access to filings, earnings transcripts, and financial data (from S&P Capital IQ). It does not, however, provide access to sources such as broker research and expert call transcripts, which are crucial for holistic and comprehensive market research. Compared to many other tools in this list, FinChat is highly cost-effective, and it differentiates itself with AI-powered chart and model generation. 

FinChat’s genAI is limited to answering only company research and metric questions—asking industry research questions yields responses with errors and hallucinations. 

FinChat also does not offer integrations with internal content, which means their genAI cannot be leveraged to improve the discoverability of internal research. 

Features and Capabilities

Natural Language Querying

FinChat allows users to input queries in natural language, making it easy to search for specific financial data, company information, or market trends. This feature eliminates the need for complex financial databases or coding knowledge, enabling users to extract relevant information quickly and efficiently.

Real-Time Market Insights

FinChat provides real-time market insights by processing the latest news, earnings reports, and market movements. Users can get up-to-date information on stock prices, market trends, and economic indicators, helping them make timely investment decisions.

Document Analysis

One of FinChat’s key capabilities is its ability to analyze financial documents such as SEC filings, annual reports, and earnings call transcripts. It extracts key insights, summarizes critical points, and highlights important information, allowing users to digest large amounts of data without spending hours reading through documents.

Integration with Financial Data Sources

The tool integrates with various financial data sources, ensuring that users have access to a comprehensive range of information. This includes data from stock exchanges, financial news outlets, and regulatory bodies, providing a holistic view of the market landscape. However, this does not include access to broker research or expert calls—which are key to an effective and differentiated market research strategy.

Customizable Dashboards

FinChat offers customizable dashboards where users can monitor their preferred data feed, news, and market updates. This feature allows users to personalize their interface according to their specific needs and interests, ensuring they have quick access to the most relevant information. The amount of dashboards allowed per user depends on the pricing tier selected.

Sentiment Analysis

FinChat includes sentiment analysis tools that evaluate the tone and sentiment of financial news, reports, and social media discussions. This helps users gauge market sentiment, identify potential market-moving events, and understand the broader impact of news on stock prices and investor behavior.

FinChat Strengths

• User-friendly interface, similar to ChatGPT’s
• Able to generate models and charts in-platform via natural language prompts
• Cost-effective for smaller businesses or individual users
• Employs guardrails against genAI hallucination and verifies accuracy of information to ensure reliable results
• Provides paragraph-level citations and multiple sources for each snippet of a response
• Robust compliance

FinChat Weaknesses

• Only includes filings, earnings transcripts, and financial data (from S&P Capital IQ)
• No premium proprietary external sources such as broker research or expert calls
• No LLM verticalization, but customized for investor workflows
• Cannot upload documents and data at scale, which is crucial for enterprise organizations
• Lack of transparency around how the LLM model interprets and handles queries
• Lacks end-to-end data security, which is crucial for enterprise organizations 

Pricing

Finchat has several pricing tiers to fit different user needs. The free tier is limited to 10 chat prompts and offers limited access to financial data, KPI data, event transcripts, and estimates and rankings. It also limits users to one dashboard with 30 rows. The next tier is priced at $24 per month and includes 100 chat prompts, as well as a wider breadth of financial data, KPI data, event transcripts, and estimates and rankings. It limits users to five dashboards with 50 rows and adds notification capabilities. 

The highest tier is priced at $64 per month and includes 250 chat prompts, as well as unlimited access to all the financial data, KPI data, and event transcripts that Finchat offers and unlimited  dashboards and rows.

How to Choose the Right GenAI Tool For You

Clearly, genAI tools are not all made equal. Particularly when choosing a tool for market research, you need to be discerning and cautious. The right tool can accelerate your research process, give you access to differentiated and unique insights, and increase your organization’s efficiency and effectiveness. The wrong tool can leave your organization susceptible to risks, such as inaccurate or hallucinated information, security and data breaches, and research blind spots.

As you embark on selecting a genAI tool for you or your organization, be sure to answer the following questions:

1. What is your budget? While low-cost or free tools may be tempting to use, they ultimately cannot serve enterprise use cases and may leave your organization susceptible to unreliable data and security risk—though they can serve a limited set of use cases. Among the enterprise-grade tools in this list, capabilities and features vary substantially. Ultimately, the more features, content sets, and customization you require in your tool, the more budget you will likely need to spend.
2. What are your business needs? Are you simply looking for a tool that will help you summarize information, create content, and help with workflow productivity? You may then get away with one of the consumer-grade or emerging startup tools. If, however, you need an enterprise-grade tool that provides access to premium and proprietary content, protects your data and security, and has strong guardrails against hallucination—with years of experience and thousands of satisfied customers—you should consider one of the purpose-built market intelligence genAI tools.
3. Do you need integration with internal data? Enterprise organizations benefit substantially from genAI tools that can be applied to their internal content, promoting discoverability of internal knowledge, as well as team collaboration and productivity.
4. How much customization do you need? Generally, the more low-cost a tool, the less customization you get. Consider whether you need a tool with customizable dashboards and alerts, or whether more generic options would suffice. 
5. What kind of content do you need access to? The tools in this list vary considerably in terms of the type of content they provide access to. There are tools that provide access only to public web data, tools that only give access to financial data and earnings transcripts, and tools with much more robust content offerings that help you get a much more holistic view of the market.
6. What level of data protection and compliance do you need? For organizations with sensitive data, it’s critical to select a tool that has robust compliance and end-to-end data security standards. For individual or consumer-grade usage, compliance and data privacy are less important. 

If you are an enterprise organization who is looking to accelerate, enhance, and differentiate your market research process using generative AI, AlphaSense is the right tool for you.

AlphaSense is the only tool on this list that checks all the boxes:

• Trained on financial and business-grade data sourced only from premium sources
• Built specifically for business use cases, meaning better and more reliable answers to your questions
• Provides citations to exact snippets of source material for quick review
• Market-leading search technology
• Access to premium, proprietary external content sources including company documents, news, broker research, and expert calls—all in one platform
• Integrates seamlessly with your internal research, so you can leverage our genAI for greater discoverability of internal content
• High-impact solution that expedites key use cases beyond earnings analysis, such as market landscaping, competitive intelligence, M&A screening, fundamental research, due diligence, and more
• 10+ years of serving the most security-conscious companies in the world, with the highest standards for compliance and data security

Try AlphaSense for Free

In today’s age of fast-moving markets and information overload, a genAI market research solution is integral for organizations to stay efficient, competitive, and secure. AlphaSense is your one-stop solution for premium business and financial content—which includes everything you need for holistic market research—and the generative AI technology to help you maximize the value you get from the data. Discover the power of genAI-fueled market research, and see how AlphaSense can help you get the competitive edge and reach new heights.

Start your free trial today.

Check out this case study to learn how ODDO BHF, one of the largest private banks in Germany, used AlphaSense and its genAI capabilities to streamline insights and get the competitive edge.