AI Case Study
The Associated Press has 14-fold increase in its quarterly corporate earnings reporting using Automated Insights' natural language generation platform
The AP started using Automated Insight's Wordsmith platform to automate the reporting on corporate earnings by American companies every quarter, resulting in 14 times the number of stories being published.
Industry
Consumer Goods And Services
Media And Publishing
Project Overview
"AP found answers in automation with the Wordsmith platform from Automated Insights. Wordsmith uses natural language generation to turn data into a written, plain-language narrative. In this case, Wordsmith transforms earnings data from Zacks Investment Research into a publishable AP story in a fraction of a second. In fact, the Wordsmith team specifically configured the natural language generation engine to write in AP style."
Reported Results
"As a result, AP now produces 4,400 quarterly earnings stories – a 12-fold increase over its manual efforts. The stories retain the same quality and accuracy that readers expect from any of AP’s human-written articles. Aside from an explanatory note at the bottom of the story, there is no evidence they were written by an algorithm. Internally, the reaction has been positive from staff, largely because automation has freed up valuable reporting time and reduced the amount of data-processing type work they had been doing. estimate the automation of earnings reports has freed up about 20 percent of the time that we had spread throughout the staff in producing earnings reports each quarter.”
Technology
Function
Information Technology
Knowledge Management
Background
"Every quarter, public companies in the US release corporate earnings. And every quarter, Associated Press reporters plowed through those reports, extracting the relevant financial numbers to compose stories based on those numbers. There were two problems with this approach. First, AP could only produce 300 such stories per quarter – that left thousands of potential company earnings stories unwritten. Second, these stories were not only taking up reporters’ time – they were, in the words of USA Today’s Roger Yu, 'the quarterly bane of the existence of many business reporters.' New York Magazine’s Kevin Roose remembers corporate earnings recaps as 'a miserable early-morning task that consisted of pulling numbers off a press release, copying them into a pre-written outline, affixing a headline, and publishing as quickly as possible so that traders would know whether to buy or sell.'"
Benefits
Data
Corporate earnings documents released online