Ken Sena, co-founder, and CEO at Aiera discusses how Aiera is revolutionizing the use of artificial intelligence by investment analysts:
We started Aiera with the idea of just trying to help clients engage with the advances that were coming through tech. Our focus was really Amazon. Aiera spawned from an Amazon research report, where we’re trying to just advocate for clients that they have to start taking this seriously in terms of how industries will change. We thought one way to help them do that aside from just the stock price and what Amazon had been doing in the past was to help them look to how their own roles could change.
Aiera stands for AI Equity Research Analysis. The AI is silent. Within Aiera we’re really trying to pay respect to the research analysts role. We’re trying to learn that the best we can in terms of the rules that they follow to understand markets that are constantly in flux, equities, and where their stories are constantly changing. We’ve been at this for about three years now.
Analysts really want to understand the why. They want to understand the critical events within conferences, filings, and news. We want to make that as easy as possible. What we’re trying to help clients with the most is helping them be able to be updated on the 40,000 events that we are processing right now. We want to help them access those events easily. Ultimately, whether it’s through alerts, search, or comparisons, really be more informed than they’ve been in the past. That’s how we’re trying to revolutionize the more traditional sell-side models.
A little bit is generational (in terms of the use of Aiera). When we started Aiera the business side was very focused in New York. All of our clients were in New York and there was a lot more face to face and a lot more in their offices showing them Aiera on a big screen. But inevitably we’d run into well how do we connect to the WiFi? Well, can you see what I’m trying to show you here? Whereas on a screen you can just follow the cursor. It’s easier to express to that other side exactly what it is trying to show them when selling software.
My generation still very much values that face-to-face. But when I look at our devs and most of them have worked distributed from the beginning they don’t value that same kind of face-to-face. I can also look to the other generations particularly those who are in tech and say they don’t need it in the same way. They don’t even know maybe what they’re missing in the same way that I feel from what’s happened during COVID.
Aiera is an event intelligence and insights platform founded by former Internet equity research analyst, Ken Sena (CEO), and Amazon Alexa engineering lead, Bryan Healey (CTO). Aiera began as a collaboration on how natural language processing could improve investment workflow. Aiera now covers over 40,000 live events per year, including earnings calls, analyst days, management conferences, and more, tying these events to millions of documents it is simultaneously processing and analyzing, and offering users the ability to set intelligent monitors to track what matters to them most.