Evan Pondel co-authored “AI in Corporate Disclosure: IR Survey Evidence, Legal Risks, and Research Opportunities,” published in Accounting Horizons, a journal of the American Accounting Association. His co-authors are Marcus Kirk of the University of Florida’s Fisher School of Accounting and Peter Molk of the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law.
The paper examines how artificial intelligence is changing corporate disclosure through three lenses: what investor relations practitioners are actually doing, how the legal and regulatory picture is developing, and what capital markets research can tell us.
Key findings
- Adoption is cautious. IR teams are mostly using AI for lower-risk work such as summarization and administrative support, not for investor-facing disclosure.
- The concerns are real. Practitioners worry most about selective disclosure, bias and information governance. In the underlying survey, 82% of IR professionals cited disclosure risk, 91% cited accuracy or bias, and 74% cited data privacy.
- Governance has to come first. AI can improve the quality and efficiency of disclosure, but only with real controls around legal, regulatory and informational risk.
What it means for companies
Before AI touches anything investor-facing, companies need a written AI policy, a clear view of which tools can see which information, and training for the people using them. That last point is where many fall short: only about one in four companies surveyed had offered any AI-related training in the prior two years.
A working version of the paper is available on SSRN.