AlphaSense's AI Market Intel for Consulting

 

613. Brian Stollery

SPEAKERS

Brian Stollery, Will Bachman

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Will, hello and welcome to Unleashed. I’m your host. Will Bachman, you can sign up for the newsletter for this show at umbrexdotcom/unleashed where I’ll send you the show notes for every episode, and we usually send some bonus material. And so that way, if you don’t want to listen to every episode of the show you can find out about him. Now today I’m very excited to welcome Brian Stollery from AlphaSense. He’s going to tell about it, tell us all about what that firm does. It’s a information provider that I’ve heard really great things about, and I’m excited to hear more, Brian. Welcome to the show.

 

Brian Stollery  00:39

Thanks so much for having me Will and very excited to be connecting with the Umbrex community. You know, I essentially consult for consultants. So really happy to dive in and really today, I’ll be walking you through exactly how independent consultants and boutique firms are using AlphaSense to gain the same information edge as the victory in the Big Four and really gain an edge above anyone who’s solely relying on a chat GPT or a consumer LLM to scale an independent consulting practice. So I imagine that most listeners are highly fluent in AI. I imagine many are probably paying for chat, GPT Pro or similar tools, and a lot of folks are talking about the 10x consultant, right? But here’s the truth, at least, that that we’ve seen some of those tools aren’t enough for serious consulting use cases, right? AlphaSense was built for this kind of work, so we’re pulling in every piece of verified content that consultants need, industry reports, broker research filings, earnings calls, expert calls, news, even internal research and internal content, and then layering that with a market leading AI functionality that can really read and synthesize all of it so you can deliver consulting grade insights at scale. All right, so let me just pause any questions before we dive in. Yeah,

 

Will Bachman  02:16

yeah. Let me just pause you there. So first, I want to just clarify, in case there’s any confusion. So because some people may probably get confused, there is alpha sights, s, I, G, T, S sites, AlphaSights, which is the expert network that many folks are familiar with. But we’re not talking to AlphaSights today. We’re talking to AlphaSense, right? And you listed a range of types of sources of information that you have, so we’ll want to dive into those. Maybe just start like 50,000 foot level. What is AlphaSense? You guys are not primarily an expert network like alpha sites. What is AlphaSense?

 

Brian Stollery  03:03

That’s right? Will we get confused all the time? So definitely appreciate that one part of our content set is expert calls, like an AlphaSights, a GLG, a third bridge, right? That is one part of it, 30,000 foot view AlphaSense is a market company and enterprise intelligence search engine for the AI generation. What I mean by that? Yesterday even today, a lot of consultants are using Capital IQ or Gartner or Forrester. They’re doing one off expert calls. They’re using Google today, a lot of consultants are using the large language models, your chatgpt, your perplexity, right? Getting a lot of use alphasense is really the depth and breadth of authoritative data that one would get from a legacy research platform with the really intuitive user experience of the modern AI tools that everyone is using, and really the value is the deep, authoritative content set that is the foundation of AlphaSense, along with the speed and accuracy which the AI allows our users to very quickly surface relevant insights from that content set. Does that make sense?

 

Will Bachman  04:30

It does. Why don’t you go through it with us a little slower, before we get into the use cases and so forth. Just talk us through what are the major categories of sources of proprietary information that feed into alpha, since that you get access to.

 

Brian Stollery  04:49

Yeah. So I think, for that, I think I’ll just go ahead and share my screen, and I think it will make sense. I’ll kind of show it to you, Will, and then we can kind of talk through it together for the audience. Does that make sense?

 

Will Bachman  05:00

Yeah. So while we are doing an audio here, Brian and I are on a video call, so I’m seeing a screen, and I’ll give you a narration of what I’m seeing. And let’s also plan to include some screenshots which we can post, if that’s all right. Brian, absolutely, we could post some of these screenshots, so I’ll take a screenshot of this page right here, and then we can post those on the page. So if you go to ombrex.com/unleashed, and get to the page for this episode, we’ll have a permalink. Then I will post these screenshots. So So talk to me about what I’m seeing right here. I see, well, maybe I’ll just narrate it, and then you correct me. So on the left hand side, there’s kind of a an index where I can go to different things. There’s like a dashboards and a set of maybe like searches that have been done in the past. And here, this page is consumer tech. There’s kind of four quadrants. The upper left is portfolio monitor with a list of companies. Bottom left is research topics. Top right is expert insights on consumer tech, and then bottom right is news on consumer tech. And then there’s risk signals on consumer tech growth investment strategy. And then there’s events, all company documents and talent job executive movements. So there’s these eight or nine different kind of widgets that are there that I can be monitoring. You know, these different cuts of of articles, and it looks like each one of these will have a list of seven or eight articles. Maybe it scrolls down, and you see more and more on those topics. And I guess I can click through to the to the source of those.

 

Brian Stollery  06:44

That’s exactly right. So what you’re looking at here will this is our dashboard, right? This is the homepage of AlphaSense, where many of our consulting users start their day. So this is our consumer tech dashboard. It’s really a curated, customizable, real time digest of key industry or company movements, trends or competitive intelligence. So this first widget here, you’re seeing expert insights. We’re seeing from eight o’clock this morning ahead of business planning at Google Ads believes that generative AI focus and internal challenges are key to navigating their competitive landscape. We see a former director at Cisco Systems, he’s financial services and tech leading trends while healthcare lags and it goes on and so essentially,

 

Will Bachman  07:34

news articles or these interviews with these people. What are these that we’re looking

 

Brian Stollery  07:40

at? So these are pre recorded, pre transcribed expert calls. So these are conversations between buy side analysts or our corporate users, and a head of business planning from Google, a vice president at Paramount, a CFO at Ford, a former director at Novartis, right? And so these are the types of expert calls that one might otherwise go to, an alpha sites or a GLG to conduct, you know, a one off call with a third bridge AlphaSense, sort of flipped that model. And so within our platform, we have over 200,000 free recorded, transcribed expert calls that is part of our library that our AI can analyze when we’re doing any kind of research, we’re adding 5000 per month. And again, these are subject matter experts giving their neutral insight on what’s happening in these companies or within these industries, from folks who are really walking the halls there

 

Will Bachman  08:49

now, who is conducting these 5000 expert calls, like, Who’s Who’s the interviewer?

 

Brian Stollery  08:56

Yeah, so the interviewer are usually our buy side analysts, our financial services users at alphasense, or some of our corporate users, right? So alphasense, we work with corporate development teams. We’ll work with a head of corporate strategy, who will actually go and well, well, it’s fine. So here we head of business planning at Google Ads believes Gen AI focus and internal changes are key to navigating competitive landscape. Let’s open that call. So if I click it opens this call, we can see that this was an interview from June 20. It was business led, and the conversation covered various topics related to Google, and this was a director of portfolio operations at Super step capita

 

Will Bachman  09:44

profile. That was the that was the bio of the person who was being interviewed, the person who’s being interviewed. So okay, so this is not like an AlphaSense employee who is going and conducting. These interviews, these are actually your customers. Will be interviewing an expert, and then you are publishing those interviews that are now those people like, pay less. Like, if I’m a customer and I want to interview an expert, can I keep it confidential? I’d like, let’s say I don’t want to share it to the universe. I have questions that only I want to know about. I don’t want everybody to know the these answers. Or is it like every call that I do with an expert through AlphaSense automatically going to be published so everybody else can see it too?

 

Brian Stollery  10:39

We believe that a rising tide lifts all boats, and that is why every, every expert call that happens throughout the sense is published back in the platform to further enhance and grow our library. And to your point, well, that is why we don’t. We don’t really do this within consulting, because within management consulting, as you said, especially for independent consultants, oftentimes there, there are certain senses of areas where you wouldn’t necessarily want to provide Intel to competitors or other firms. And so for calls like that, you would, you would be better suited to go within Alpha sites. But the use case for AlphaSense is say you’re doing, say you’re doing a commercial due diligence for private equity about, I don’t know, insurance impacts for autonomous driving, right? And maybe you want to get 20, 30% ahead of that project scope. You could go in AlphaSense and then see what other experts are already saying about that topic or that trend or that space, right? So it’s a way to really get up to speed for an engagement. It’s a way to search across benchmark expert perspectives. And then again, you might go and still conduct a number of your own calls as well. But really, Al cents is a way to kind of both bolster that, you know, within the management consulting space,

 

Will Bachman  12:09

okay, got it so, so as a customer, you can book expert calls, but they will be published so that everybody else can see, can see the output too. Okay, got it. And are most of what we’re looking at here, like, all these different widgets. Are these all? Like, those expert calls, like the when you like the news section? Oh no, that was just expert insights. So if I go down, we go down to the news section, you know, Walmart to continue embedding something, data, smart data capture and associate apps so that’s from chain store age. And, oh, we have drugstore news. And, okay, so these are from various newspapers or industry kind of trade journals and stuff.

 

Brian Stollery  12:51

That’s right, you know, which maybe today you might get through a Yahoo or a Google News or a LexisNexis or maybe, you know, aggregating news using perplexity. Hey, perplexity. Tell me all the recent news around consumer, tech or retail, right? But it’s really all here. So within applesense, one part of our content set is those expert calls. Another part of our content set that we drop from is news. So we have over 6000 vetted business and market news sources and trade journals, most of which require a paywall. And AlphaSense allows users to bypass those paywalls. And then, to the left here, you’re seeing research. So these are upgrades, downgrades from the bulge brackets industry, commodity market reports that you you might be buying for, you know, a couple 100 or a couple 1000 bucks from a research firm in India, or getting from a Capital IQ or a Gartner. So we have the entire sell side of equity research, and actually over 700 partners. We have an exclusive with Goldman. So you can see here, O’Neill, consumer, retail, weekly, event driven research on the Home Depot from Gordon Haskett. Report on RoboTaxi services from China, Renaissance anthropic copyright report from Washington. Analysis from Michael Gordon the analyst, right? So we’re getting the analyst perspective. So, you know, I would just invite any listeners just to think about all the places that this content would normally come from, right like, maybe you’re getting SEC filings in one place, earnings calls in another. You’re buying one off analyst reports from another source. Alpha says AlphaSense really consolidates it all in real time. It’s all verified with no need for additional subscriptions or entitlements, really a one stop shop. And I’ll also note that it’s not scraping the web. It’s not guessing like a consumer large language model might. It’s really. The, you know, the dashboard here is your institutional grade content engine,

 

Will Bachman  15:06

okay, so you get access to research reports from the major investment banks.

 

Brian Stollery  15:15

Yeah, absolutely. And I can, I can even show you, so if I do a search here and just open up our content library. If I go to our broker research, then I go to select here, you can see we have Barclays, Bank of America, credit, Suisse, storage bank, Goldman, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley UBS. Then we also have major brokers from all around the world. And then we also, we have all their upgrades, downgrades, price target revisions, initiation reports, credit research, industry reports, macro reports, commodities strategy and others. And those can be really valuable, especially for independent consultants who are looking to get kind of the same informational edge from, you know, as the big three or a bigger firm that they might have

 

Will Bachman  16:00

come from. Okay, cool.

 

Brian Stollery  16:04

Yeah. So, yeah, that’s the dashboard. And you can see also we were basically pulling any relevant documents talking about executive movements related to consumer tech, any risk signals, any growth or investment strategy. And I’ll also show you right now we’re looking across the entire portfolio monitor, but let’s say, you know, we go to Adobe and I click, now it’s going to repopulate, and now all those widgets are repopulated with expert insights, research, news, risk signals, growth strategy, etc. Tagged to Adobe, okay? Or tagged to, I don’t know, Airbnb, right? A super host sees a need for better support. FORMER PRINCIPAL believes Airbnb remains uniquely positioned. Airbnb is co founder, steps up stock sales, right? So, yeah, any any other questions on the dashboard before I move on here will,

 

Will Bachman  17:01

no, let’s, well, maybe just on the talent jobs executive movements walk me through that one.

 

Brian Stollery  17:08

Yeah, absolutely. So what I will do is, if I can, I’ll go to this widget and I can go explore from here. Now, this is, this is our document search module within AlphaSense. This is historically, originally how users would conduct research in AlphaSense. So I can see I’ve actually ran a Boolean search for executive search or talent or executive churn, or C suite departure or new CEO, or layoffs or hiring, and I’m running that Boolean search against my watch list of consumer tech companies, and I’m narrowing the results to expert Insights, event transcripts, press releases and news. So I’m now just pulling the most relevant documents which are talking about those trigger words related to my watch listing companies. So like I would invite listeners to think about what are the trigger words for you know, your business development or your due diligence and and you know, what would you want to get those from? And that, you know, ultimately, Alvis kind of allows our users to get very forensic with where they’re going to pull those insights from. And you can also see at the top here we have generate summary. So now I can toggle our AI to essentially go and read these 481, documents and pull up a answer, and now you’re seeing that it doesn’t have enough information to pull a complete answer, and that the evidence discussing churn and hiring practices and mentioning align technologies and Yelp, and I will point to that one thing that is really valuable with AlphaSense, if the answer is not there, our AI will tell you. And there are consumer tools where, if an answer is not there, it will sometimes make a guess or a hallucination. And so that is one reason why, you know why the big three, the Big Four, do use AlphaSense and really kind of rely on our AI for those top tier consulting use cases, because we’re not going to make something up it’s not there,

 

Will Bachman  19:41

all right, so thanks for showing me the dashboard. What are like some other ways of using the tool other than you can start with the dashboard, look at a given industry or given company and see all these different widgets. But like, what are some other ways of interacting with the tool?

 

Brian Stollery  19:58

Yeah. So really. One of the most popular ways this day and age is our generative search. So this might look familiar. You want to, want to describe what you’re seeing here. Well, well, it’s,

 

Will Bachman  20:14

it looks somewhat like an open AI chat window. It says, Ask AlphaSense, and you can select docs i and or do deep research, and then below it has some says, Get started with generative search, and has a variety of options, which I imagine are sort of pre populated, kind of like a custom chat where it has company information, industry information, macro, regulatory, company segments and company metrics and so forth. So, yeah, looks like a chat window.

 

Brian Stollery  20:50

It’s exactly right. And so there’s a reason for that. Really Alpha census generative search is it’s a research analyst team in a box. So really, what’s happening here? Well, actually, I’ll, I’ll, um, I’ll ask you, Will, is there, is there a macro business question that might be top of mind for you, that we could just plug in to show how this works? Could be, like a market size? Could be a pricing trend, like anything top of mind.

 

Will Bachman  21:22

Well, this is a show that is sort of about consulting some degree. So why don’t we say, you know, a lot of people ask me, Hey, how are the big consulting firms doing this year? So, you know, be interesting to say something about, you know, how is McKinsey, Bain BCG doing in 2025, or how, you know, how do we think outside in their hiring is doing, or their revenues are doing currently?

 

Brian Stollery  21:51

Yeah, so I’m saying, How is McKinsey and large How are McKinsey and larger firms doing in 2025 discuss how the big players revenue and talent and hiring and and growth are going this year, yeah, and any positives or negatives, right? Yeah, I

 

Will Bachman  22:18

want to make it more specific ones that let’s call it McKinsey Bain and BCG. Let’s do that.

 

Brian Stollery  22:24

How are McKinsey Bain and BCG doing in 25 discuss their revenue, discuss their revenue and talent and hiring and growth areas and generally, how it’s going this year, and any positives, negatives, risks or opportunities, right? Sure. So now, if I run that question, I’ll kind of narrate what’s happening here. Now we can see the AI agent is breaking that question into sub questions. It has found 3000 documents across our content library. It’s going to load those documents here on the left hand side, it’s it’s gone to the library. It’s opening the filing cabinets. It’s looking through. It’s pulling things off the shelf. It’s saying, How am I going to answer this question? It’s collecting all those documents here on the left, so we can see, it’s pulling from expert calls. We have a 10k we have a press release, we have an investor relations presentation. We have a research report from Mizuho. We have an ISS governance report on sustainability. And now it’s taking those 3000 documents. Obviously, will be very hard for a human being to read those 3000 documents in 30 seconds, but the AI is very good at that. So now it’s read those documents and it’s output a summary. You want to do the honors? Well,

 

Will Bachman  24:10

yeah, I mean, maybe even if, if you’re allowed to, we could share some of this output. But it’s, it’s giving some bullet points on McKinsey, revenue, growth, talent and hiring positives, negatives. And it has links to either expert calls. It’s linking to several different expert calls and several other sources of data. And for Bain, it’s linking to a press release to several expert calls and a 10k which is kind of odd. BCG, yeah. Aquas, data, private, limited, interesting. Wonder what that is. They must have issued a report, yeah. So, all right, so, so this is kind of a little bit. Like you might get from chat GPT, but the source data is actual, proprietary data news sources that chat GPT is not being trained on.

 

Brian Stollery  25:16

That’s exactly right. And the other thing that I’ll mention you know, we have sentence level citations, right? So every, every single sentence that the AI outputs is actually deep linked and cited to the where that came from. So we can see McKinsey sciences for growth. McKinsey maintains brand leadership. The firm’s 2025 focus includes McKinsey, McKinsey sciences for growth, which integrates tech enabled capabilities and AI. We can see that came from an expert call from February. We can see that BCG reported 13 point 5 billion in 2024 revenue achieving 10% global growth, expanding its workforce to 33,000 employees. And that’s coming from a quiz, data acquis, data limited, which is which put out a management consulting report in June. And now we can see again, this is a this is a 40 page report from Aquos data and AlphaSense is taking us to the one sentence in this 40 page report where they’re talking about BCGs Salesforce effectiveness and projected increases in revenue and profit there, all right, and you hit the nail on the head, right? Looks and feels like a chatgpt. Chatgpt is a wonderful tool. I use it every day, right? Not knocking chatgpt at all. But really the difference, the differentiation with applesense, is our AI is really purpose built for management consulting use cases, and we’re the only tool like this with this kind of large language model experience that is drawing From investment banking and equity research, as well as expert calls. The other thing that’s really nifty, behind the scenes, we actually have a number of different models within AlphaSense, and we’re actually pointing the best and most performant model from our partners at the use case, and then it’s all grounded in high quality and really relevant documents. So in our back end, we have 03 from open AI. We have sonnet four from anthropic. We have Gemini 2.5 we’re using open source models like llama and quin we partnered with cerebros. We’re using their wafer scaling engine. They actually own their own silicon. There’s these giant silicon chips that are like the size of pizza boxes, and that’s how we have that super speed, right? So the way to think about it is, on one hand, when you search in AlphaSense, you’re searching across this really comprehensive market leading library of authoritative content that consultants care about, and then you’re running that search through all of the leading foundation models and then alpha, since part of the intelligence is selecting which model will actually give the best output depending on the question whether it needs to be more, you know, more reasoning based or quantitative, qualitative, etc. Does that make sense? Yeah,

 

Will Bachman  28:51

it does. So. Talk to me about some typical use cases you can see for management consultants, I can see how. You know, equity analysts will find this helpful, or a someone at a hedge fund who’s really trying to investigate a particular company or stock. What are the typical ways that you see management consultants using the platform?

 

Brian Stollery  29:22

Yeah, absolutely great question. So here in generative search, as you can see, we have a couple modes. We have think longer, which is basically a way to do a little more deeper reasoning, connect some additional dots, and then we have deep research, which is a way to essentially create a fully blown consulting grade report. So I pre loaded a think longer here. And this was actually a use case with a consulting user that I was working with just yesterday. So we had a client at, you know, pretty, pretty established, like mid. Consulting firm, and they had a meeting with a client partner at iHeart and their team, right? So I’ve now typed into AlphaSense. I’m preparing for a meeting with a lead client partner at iHeart, working with my boutique consulting firm that focuses on digital strategy. What will likely be top of mind for this prospect in terms of any internal strategic initiatives around technology or digitization or AI that I heart is looking to bring to bear, so we can see I told it to think longer. So this took about three minutes. The AI went through transcripts, expert calls, earnings calls and press releases from iHeart, and it summarized essentially what I would call a first meeting pack on steroids. And so we can see that I heart C suite has repeatedly framed technology, notably programmatic ad tech and AI enabled automation as the single biggest lever for cost savings and digital revenue acceleration. And now I can see some really relevant, salient insights around their net savings targets, how they’re building a single, cloud based inventory. We can see integration of unified ID 2.0 with the trade desk that’s coming from JP Morgan. We can see a little bit about their smart audio. So it’s really just, ultimately, hey, I’m a consultant. I’m going to meet with XYZ. What’s going to be top of mind? And we actually, we have an iPhone app as well. And so this can all be done on the fly. Really big use case is walking the conference floor at a conference. Hey, I see the the chief investment officer of Bank of America over there. You know what’s going to be top of mind for them. They can go and kind of break through, open up a conversation there. So meeting prep, definitely a big one. Understanding client intelligence, understanding what’s top of mind really quickly, understanding prospects, you know, any initiatives they’re looking to bring to bear, and then competitive intelligence is also a very big use case. So earlier today, just for this meeting, I I primed a deep research report, and I can the prompt here is create a comprehensive competitive competitive intelligence and market landscape report geared toward independent consultants and boutique consulting firms that are part of the umbrex network and how they are able to capitalize and harness macro uncertainty, AI disintermediation and current market conditions to better compete with bigger consulting firms like McKinsey Accenture and the big three and the big four. So we can see the conversation basically in deep research, the AI has a conversation with itself. It’s actually really kind of creepy and exciting to actually watch the AI literally have a conversation with itself saying, Let me search this. No, I’m not going to search that. This is better. And basically it will analyze all the bullet points, provided it will plan insights on every section. And now we can see we essentially have a fully blown Competitive Intelligence Report for umbrex, and we can see some chatter here on the core service offerings for independence and boutiques. We can look at typical engagement models, pricing structures, sector and capability specialization, how they differ from the big three, the Big Four, news partnerships, partnerships and tech bets, competitive intelligence. So we can look at key differentiators for McKinsey and BCG, the Big Four, and Deloitte, and it’s nicely organized here in the chart. And, yeah, I’d be more than happy to actually send this over to you to share with your network as well. Well, that’d

 

Will Bachman  33:55

be cool. I’d love to see it so you’re this is called deep research now chat open AI has you know a feature within chat GPT is deep research that is comes with chat GPT Plus subscription, or you can get it unlimited with chat GPT Pro. Or, like, maybe not unlimited, like 30 or 40 per month. Is this the same? I mean, is this powered by chat GPT deep research, or is it just coincidentally named?

 

Brian Stollery  34:30

So sometimes, depending on the inquiry, sometimes it will actually use oh three from chat GPT to create the report different content. But more often than not, it’s actually using quad, quad Sonic four, because we find that’s actually even a little stronger. And you know to your point, chatgpt, deep research is great for like. Like pulling from readily available information from the internet, like I was working with a friend of mine, whose son is is applying for colleges, and he needed to create a really comprehensive spreadsheet of every college, what was Division One, two or three in La Crosse, where they were located, what the tuition was, right? All that stuff which is going to be on those college websites. Excellent use case for chatgpt, deep research with AlphaSense. Really, the differentiation is the content, right? So you can see, we’re pulling from broker research, banking reports, expert calls. So it’s, it’s not coincidence, right? It is deep research, but it’s, it’s drawing from a more authoritative content set. And as I said, it’s, it’s really purpose built for consulting use cases.

 

Will Bachman  35:59

Okay, great. And let’s see you mentioned kind of the investment bank research reports. You talked about all the expert interviews that are proprietary, that were done through the platform. What about like, SEC filings, those all like pulled in from all public companies.

 

Brian Stollery  36:25

Yeah, yeah. And that, actually, that reminds me of another really cool use case. So, so this, now that I’m showing this is AlphaSenses, generative grid, which is essentially a a generative AI Powered spreadsheet to aggregate documents and then interrogate them. So what you’re seeing here I’ve taken definitive 14, a proxy filings from I heart Capital One. Vistra Kimberly Clark, this is for a consulting user that I was working with, and this is basically for tracking executive compensation and the components for target accounts, right? So these are all pulled from the proxy filings, and we can see here the first column is, how are executives compensated this company extract out the components of the executive officer compensation. We can now look at the performance components. Extract out the details of the performance objectives or goals right list only the name KPIs allocated and again, if, if a strategic pillar as defined in a company’s SEC filings, is tethered to an executive’s compensation. You can bet that that pillar, or that need, is going to be diffused all the way down across that company, and so really, the grid gives our consulting users a much deeper analysis, with much cleaner dots connecting the SEC SEC filings to the company’s performance components, we can look at the past performance to, you know, understand what’s The temperature in the room, and then what’s really cool in terms of use cases. So look here in this last column, I’ve said you are selling consulting, transformation and strategic advisory services to this company. What value drivers would you attach in your messaging? Help attach the value drivers of your services to key performance indicators where this organization has missed recently, answering 25 words or less, and so now we’re actually telling AlphaSense. Hey, go look at this proxy filing. Pull out the components of the executive compensation, how they’re tethered to free cash flow, or human capital, or strategic objectives, or EBITDA, tell me a little bit about their past performance if they’ve maybe recently missed and then sum up what me as a consultant will be able to actually go in and attach my value drivers directly to those performance components. So we can see focus on adjusted EBITDA growth, cost optimization, Target, discover integration execution drive adjusted ROTC and revenue growth tied to executive compensation. So

 

Will Bachman  39:58

So talk me through. Are the types of use cases, the types of projects that consultants are using this tool.

 

Brian Stollery  40:09

Yeah, so it really, Val, really varies. You know, one big one is business development understanding, you know, the propensity for M and A or divestitures, right? Like seeing where companies are talking about changes in management or new strategic initiatives or negative guidance, or seeking sell divest. So we can see here that UCB is divesting established brands. We can see they’re talking about M and A opportunities to strengthen existing capital, right? So, lot of use for m and a consulting. We have a deal scanner right for M A consultants that are looking at any acquisitions or private equity deals across a portfolio of companies or an industry, also due diligence. Again, I was actually working with a consultant who was putting together a commercial due diligence report on the insurance impacts of autonomous driving for a major insurance firm. So they used AlphaSense for that big use is business development. There’s meeting prep, there’s Company Research, there’s trend analysis, there’s market assessment, there’s client benchmarking, peer benchmarking, account monitoring, account prioritization, sentiment analysis, right? What is my client’s sentiment in the market, right? Like, if I type in, I don’t know, Boeing, I can see a little sentiment score, right? So they have a good sentiment score. I can get really quickly up to speed and get a SWOT analysis from their recent earnings call, understanding research, upgrades, downgrades, expert calls. So, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s really, sort of, really, sort of a one stop shop for those management and consulting use cases. And that is, that is why we do work with the big three, the big four. And that is why we also really are, are excited about extending the same kind of intelligence to the boutique firms.

 

Will Bachman  42:25

So we talked about it has all the SEC filings are pulled in. It has like 6000 plus newspapers and trade journals and so forth, access to that. It has investment bank coverage and reports. What does alphasense have, like that crunch of the stuff that, let’s say, on CrunchBase? What? What does CrunchBase have, that alpha since also has or is, and I thought we could go through some other, not necessarily competitors, but other sorts of information providers about companies like CrunchBase, capital, IQ, pitch book. What’s kind of the interesting for me to know, the overlap of things that, if we think about the Venn diagram, what’s the thing that you both have access to? What’s the thing that capital I that AlphaSense has, that the other one does not and what’s thing that the other one might have that AlphaSense does not? Like, can you talk to me about that? About like CrunchBase?

 

Brian Stollery  43:31

Yeah, so CrunchBase is actually one of our data partners, okay, so when we’re when we’re pulling revenue, or valuation or headcount, especially for a private company, those will come from CrunchBase or hour

 

Will Bachman  43:54

or what, what was the other one hour? Is that like, Oh, you are

 

Brian Stollery  44:00

O, W, L, E, R, oh, hour.

 

Will Bachman  44:03

Okay, got it, yeah, okay,

 

Brian Stollery  44:07

right. So, like, if I see we have crunch base and our if I just type in so CrunchBase will pull in their revenue and their employee count for a private company. So we, we have all the revenue and employee information in CrunchBase, as well as our as well as Morningstar.

 

Will Bachman  44:29

Okay, so if it’s in CrunchBase, you can access it via AlphaSense, because you have access to their database

 

Brian Stollery  44:36

correct if it’s in if the revenue or employee count are in CrunchBase, you will see them in AlphaSense.

 

Will Bachman  44:45

Okay. Now, is there stuff that’s in crunch base that’s not accessible with AlphaSense? You

 

Brian Stollery  44:52

know what I there probably is, I, I, you’ll have to forgive my ignorance. I, I’m actually not. I, I. Remember the last time I went in? What

 

Will Bachman  45:02

about, probably, what about, probably, what about Capital IQ? And I’m not a heavy use with Capital IQ. It’s been a long time since I used it, but like, what’s what would be in Capital IQ that either Alpha since has or does not have

 

Brian Stollery  45:18

so Capital IQ, really, at least, what we hear is it, it’s very good at, sorry, I don’t want to hit my video there. I’m really good at telling you kind of what happened. Why does my video keep fighting, but not not as much of kind of why it matters or or what’s coming next, right? So Capital IQ does have a lot of broker research. It’s really valuable structured data, and it’s it’s cap IQ is great for quantitative data, and it’s really great for downloading Industry Reports. If you want to download a broker report or a commodities report or market report, it will have a lot of that information. It doesn’t have Goldman, but, you know, it has, you know, some of the other equity research reports. It’s, it’s really, fundamentally, it’s a strategic database of financials and filings. So it’s really great if you want to, like, get a statistical model or a financial model and plug that into Excel. That’s great, right? Difference is that AlphaSense is really a kind of end to end, purpose built intelligence engine. You can access a lot of the same investment banking reports in Capital IQ, but you have to download them one by one. You can’t really search across them all at once. You can’t go into a general search and say, Hey, tell me what brokers are saying about XYZ. And you know our sense, it includes the broker research as well as all those other content sets and then has that proprietary AI to really service the most salient decision ready insights across those billions of data points.

 

Will Bachman  47:28

Okay, how and how does AlphaSense compare with pitch book? I don’t know why my video is, oh, don’t, don’t sweat it. We’re here at the end. It’s okay, and I’m not, like, a big user of pitch book, but I just, you know, here it is one of these data sources, like, what, how do you compare with, with that?

 

Brian Stollery  47:50

Yeah, so, you know, pitch book is I, when I before AlphaSense, I actually did a number of startups. I was involved in startups, and, you know, we we use pitch book all the time. Pitch book for private company profiles for that really, really hard to find information on fundraises, who’s funding companies can be really, really good, right? And that’s one area, like, if you’re only interested in private companies and funding rounds, pitch book can be really good at that, and the difference is really the breadth of content. So we’ve we’ve actually had users. We’ve had clients who use PitchBook, who then displaced and moved to AlphaSense. Some of the news is not as good. The news can be kind of outdated. They don’t have the same kind of breadth of broker research. They don’t have expert calls or a lot of the content that we have. And then Capital IQ. There are a lot of firms too, that actually will most kind of displace cap IQ and then move to AlphaSense just because of the breadth of content and the capabilities.

 

Will Bachman  49:10

Let’s talk for a minute about I imagine that the actual price for AlphaSense may vary, and it’s a negotiated so forth. So you don’t need to get into that. But could you tell us about just the pricing structure and not referring for, you know, members of umbrex, just for the, you know, general, a general client that comes to you a boutique consulting firm like, what are the different pricing structures that you offer? Is it sort of pay by the page, or is it all you can eat one price, or is it by the project or by the query? Or how do what’s the pricing structure? Even

 

Brian Stollery  49:51

so really, the pricing structure is all you can eat for you. User per year. So it’s one price per user per year, and we operate in economies of scale. So the price of 10,000 licenses is very different than the price of one and we also do have some very creative, cool things that we can do to equip boutique firms, giving everyone access to AlphaSense.

 

Will Bachman  50:32

All right, cool. So Brian, if folks want to learn more or follow up, where would you point them online if you want them to contact you directly, how should they get in touch with you? For listeners that are interested to learn more?

 

Brian Stollery  50:50

Yeah, so happy to connect one on one with anyone from the umbrellas community that might want a more personalized demonstration of the platform. Happy to share my email and contact information on the show notes. You can look me up on LinkedIn. Brian. Story, S, T, O, L, L, E, R, Y, find me on LinkedIn. Shoot me a note B. Story at AlphaSensedotcom you can let will know. And you know, happy to connect us and yeah, would be happy to share a more personalized demonstration of the platform with anyone who’s interested, and even happy to discuss getting anyone trial access if you want to go in and actually kind of kick the tires yourself.

 

Will Bachman  51:36

Amazing. Brian. Thank you so much for joining today.

 

Brian Stollery  51:40

Thanks for having me well. Thanks for everything that you do.