The ROI of accelerating the analyst workflow with Generative AI search

What is Generative AI search for analyst firms?

If you’ve used ChatGPT, you’ll already be familiar with an AI-powered search interface. The technology that drives ChatGPT can be deployed with other specialist AI technologies to create a site-specific search function.

AI is powerful for analyst firms with vast data sets and extensive insights libraries, which are time-consuming to search. By integrating an AI-powered search tool into your insight portal, your analysts and customers can find answers to their questions from within your proprietary data.

Generative AI-powered search is faster and more immersive than conventional search. Suppose you wanted to compare coffee market trends in the US from the last five years. Finding this information would take longer with a conventional search, than using AI.

AI search is more intelligent and will give you one detailed answer to your question, drawn from multiple sources. Importantly, it will also show you exactly where to find the references it used, whether on a web page, in a Word doc, presentation, or PDF, at a page level.

Part of the analyst’s job is to answer customer queries, either directly or via a colleague such as an account manager. Here’s how analysts can respond to queries faster using AI.

How can analysts leverage Generative AI and chat-based search?

How long it takes to answer customer queries depends on the complexity of the question. Usually, an analyst will search for relevant data points or insight, copy them into an answer, and email their summary to the client. AI can speed up this process, enabling analysts to respond to more queries quicker.

MyCatalyst is our AI-powered chat discovery tool built specifically for analyst firms and their subscribers. It integrates into portals built on the Content Catalyst platform and can be used by analysts to extract relevant data and insight from a content portfolio and synthesise this information into a concise summary.

The ROI of AI is likely to be measured in terms of productivity, customer and employee satisfaction, and retention/renewals but will depends on an organisation’s business objectives. We’ve calculated the potential added value of AI for analyst firms from a time and cost savings perspective, using the scenario of an average Content Catalyst client.

What is the ROI of AI search for answering customer queries?

Consider an analyst firm using MyCatalyst internally to help analysts respond to customer queries. A research task takes the analyst approximately 3 hours, and MyCatalyst saves them 45 minutes. The average analyst firm could see 10,350 hours in time savings in a year.

Every analyst firm is different, so this calculation presumes that increased productivity and efficiency is the goal. Efficiency savings can also have a knock-on effect, such as increasing the perceived value of the relationship to the customer and, therefore, increasing the likelihood of renewal.

A leading market intelligence agency deployed AI search to its knowledge library and estimates that with their application, they can find insights ten times quicker. They can also find insights that they wouldn’t previously have been able to find, which they believe doubles the value of a subscription to their service.

In the calculation below, we use the example of an analyst firm with 50 analysts on their team. For this firm, a typical research task responding to a customer query takes 6 hours to complete. With 45 minutes saved per task, users could potentially complete 13% more tasks in the same time frame. Time saved quickly compounds, adding up to the equivalent of an additional 5.2 full-time analysts each year.

The additional time savings made from AI-powered search could allow your organisation to answer more customer queries at a faster rate, strengthening relationships with your key clients. You could re-allocate time and resources saved from searching internal libraries into value-generating activities such as high-value content commissioning, strategic planning, or other projects that are important to your organisation.

MyCatalyst offers analyst teams the potential to increase output, saving an average of 45 minutes per 6 hour task of content search within internal libraries. This means that the analyst could potentially answer 13% more customer queries. Time savings from reduced internal search could also be re-invested into high-value activities, content commissioning, strategic planning, or additional projects that are important to your organisation.

The exact ROI of Generative-AI powered search is yet to be realised, but we believe the benefits of AI will be widespread across analyst firms and transformational for the industry.