Your investors have AI…now what?

What happens when every statement, regulatory filing, and data point about your company becomes instantly queryable?

Just like everyone else, institutional investors are starting to use AI in their jobs. That means applying AI tools to comb through company documents and financials, find every discrepancy, and deepen their knowledge of your industry.

“I don’t know what happens in capital markets when your investors have the ability to truly understand and sort and scale everything you said, everything your peers have said, everything your customers, your suppliers [have said],” Brigham McNaughton, a partner at PwC, told CFO Brew. 

Overcoming human limitations. AI is good at pattern recognition and identifying where the pattern breaks. It could help investors find red flags a human eye could miss in the piles of data.

Lee Larson, an investor at VC firm Piva Capital, can “load in [a company’s] last few years of financials and understand how things have developed or where the red flags are, without my having to read through all of those financial statements and note it down myself,” he told CFO Brew.

AI research is also giving investors tools to go deep on technical industries and come armed with more specific, informed, and direct conversations and questions about the industry they’re invested in, Larson and McNaughton agreed. 

Larson said Piva’s focus is investing in energy, heavy industry, and advanced manufacturing, including advanced fission or fusion, superconductors, and decarbonizing cement—that can get extremely technical.

“The main value I get out of AI is…getting sharper on technical questions to have higher quality conversations with founders as a non-technical person. That’s been a real eye-opening thing for me,” he said.

Chris Garber, the CFO of Guild, an education platform for workforce training, has seen firsthand how the questions from his investors have changed. “The qualitative questions that they’re asking are different,” Garber told CFO Brew. “The metrics that go along with your business performing or underperforming are the same today. What they are more dialed into is what’s underpinning those trends.”

He’s not alone. A recent Gartner survey on how AI-enabled investors are changing CFOs’ IR practices showed that more than 35% of CFOs “reported an increase in the volume, frequency, and time sensitivity of investor communications and engagements in 2025 when compared to 2024.”

CFO response. CFOs are preparing for the new reality of AI-enabled investors and spending more time on investor relations because of it.

Seasoned CFO Jan Reed, founder and CEO of Silicon Valley Finance Group, believes “CFOs should welcome more informed and technical questions” from their investors, and need to get comfortable with not having every answer immediately. Responding to investor questions may now involve more time and investigation—even using their own AI tools to find the answers.

For example, CFOs can use AI to get ahead of their investors by finding the pattern breaks first and investigating why they’re occurring, Reed said. “It could be a leading indicator or a lagging indicator of some issue with the company.”

Dymah Paige, director analyst of research in Gartner’s finance practice, agreed. “CFOs should be considering private AI solutions available on the market today,” she said in a press release about Gartner’s survey.

Challenges ahead. Reed also thinks the floor for what’s considered a material issue might start dropping. Those smaller-dollar discrepancies that investors normally wouldn’t quibble over might become bigger issues once it’s easy for AI to point them out.

“No longer is materiality a $100,000 mistake; it’s now a $5,000 mistake,” she said.

Guild CFO Garber thinks the access to all this data at an investor’s fingertips could lead to a world where information is “commoditized” and the narrative gets lost in the numbers.

“That’s where CEOs, CFOs now get to step in and do the strategic part of our job,” he said. “How do you make sense of all that? How do you put it into context? How do you make sure that your investors…don’t just know the data, but they know what it means, in particular what it means about the future?”