When executives speak, CIF listens

Every quarter, company executives discuss their strategy and execution, assessing achievements and pitfalls with Wall Street analysts and shareholders. These powerful insights are buried in earnings call transcripts and presentations. It takes skilled professionals, resources, and time to find and connect the dots.

"Competitive strategy is an area of primary concern to managers, depending critically on a subtle understanding of industries and competitors. Yet the strategy field has offered few analytical techniques for gaining this understanding ..."
Competitive Strategy, Michael E. Porter, 1998.

The key to successful strategy is to know yourself and your competition. The CIF C-Suite Intelligence Report delivers timely knowledge that cannot be found in a balance sheet - insights into what your competitors are doing, what's working (tailwinds), what's not (headwinds), and shows you why using their C-Suite executives' own words.

An earnings call reveals more information than the balance sheet

A great outlook and balance sheet doesn't translate into success. Machine learning and quantitative analytics are everywhere. Yet, tools that can reliably assess the qualitative aspects of earnings calls are nowhere in sight.

The challenge to improve your %Future performance score

Quantitative metrics lack details on the "what" and the "why" impacting operational effectiveness and business strategy

It is no secret that analysts use quantitative metrics like CFROI, EVA and various ROI measures to benchmark business performance. Yet, qualitative insight into what works and what doesn’t – the headwinds & tailwinds impacting operational effectiveness and business strategy – remain a mystery. The answers are obfuscated in a company’s earnings call – a problem compounded by the lack of qualitative tools able to navigate complexity, scale, and bias in a timely manner. This leaves critical concerns unanswered, such as:

- Which lines of businesses (LOB) and strategies impact the performance of the business

- Which competitors are succeeding or struggling in terms of their lines of businesses, and how competitors are steering their business execution

Symbolic A.I. automates the analysis of earnings calls over time, eliminating bias to get the answer

CIF C-Suite Intelligence Report tracks strategy and monitors operational effectiveness over time

CIF’s Time Series Analysis of Earnings Call fills the void. Using our Symbolic Artificial Intelligence technology for natural language; SiteFocus analyzes the qualitative aspect of quarterly earnings calls over time, identifying business intelligence that is missing from quantitative reports such as the ones from CFROI.

The CIF platform applies AI with symbolic logic for natural language to analyze earnings calls and generate a shortlist of critical factors impacting strategy and operational effectiveness as presented by company executives. It identifies business intelligence that is missing from quantitative reports such as the ones from CFROI.

Reconciling operational effectiveness and strategy

Time Series Analysis on earnings call transcripts is a means to reconcile operational effectiveness and strategy. It enables the executive team to trace operational effectiveness back to strategies deployed in the past.

CIF C-Suite Intelligence Report consists of a shortlist of qualitative factors – headwind and tailwind impacting a business.

1. Showing the goal-posts get forth by the company’s strategies

2. Showing entity-relationships of head-wind, tail-wind, and work-in-progress (WIP) with traceable actual excerpts from the executive statements in the earnings-call

3. Showing the trajectory of operational effectiveness

4. Showing head-wind, tail-wind, and WIP heat maps depicting how each goal-post evolves

5. Provides a reflection of a business’s own executives, as well as a heads-up on competitive strategy

Qualitative information analysis from CIF C-Suite Intelligence Report and the quantitative analytics from CFROI empower executives to monitor and amend strategy to achieve a better outcome of %Future.

The value of a business is only applicable to a point in time. Augmenting business operation with competitive tailwinds can alter a company’s %Future and near term CFROI.

How it works

The key to successful strategy is to know yourself and your competition

Our C-Suite Intelligence Report implementation is as follows.

Step 1 - Collecting published data

Timely capture of quarterly earning-call transcript on public companies across all industries

Step 2 - Compiling the data

Recurring consecutive earning-call data aggregation

Step 3 - Cataloguing the data

Abstracting of each earning-call transcript for entity relationships

Computer cataloging of sources and abstracts

Step 4 - Digestive Analysis

a. Ranking and filtering data reliability with doubt analysis

b. Summaries of headwind/tailwind by quarters

c. Digests analysts questions and answers

d. Comparative qualitative analyses on entity-relationship

e. Plot line graphs to depict headwind, tailwind and WIP trajectory

f. Associate relevant excerpts to entity-relationships

g. Extra mentions of scenarios about the economy, prices, and competitive conditions

Step 5 - Communication to Strategist

a. In-depth, perpetually update reports on competitors

b. Provides competitor briefings in the planning process

Step 6 - Deploy & monitor strategy

Augment operations based on feedback

Step 7 - External application integration

Provide machine readable data for additional analysis by external applications

What's inside the report?

Time Series Complex Event Line Graph and Data Table - depicts tailwinds, headwinds and work-in-progress plotted on a normalized scale against each of the consecutive time periods. These line graphs depict a summarized view of the operational effectiveness of a business.

Top Ranking Entity Relationships Normalized Semantic Neighbor Distribution – this chart shows the factors that are producing the highest impact to a business.

Complex Event Analysis by Time Period – this report reconciles entity relationships to headwind, tailwind, and work-in-progress with excerpts extracted from the corresponding transcript.

Tailwind Heatmap – using color saturation and normalized quantification of entity relationships to show the varying focus of entity relationships for each quarter that move the dial positively.

Headwind Heatmap - using color saturation and normalized quantification of entity relationships to show the varying focus of entity relationships for each quarter that move the dial negatively.

Work-in-progress Heatmap – as the name implied, this heat-map uses color saturation and normalized quantification of entity relationship to show works in progress.

Downloadable Report Data in CSV Format – this data is provided for external applications to use as an input source for embedded analytics.

A use case: Automated Qualitative Due Diligence Reporting for Leveraged Buyouts

Augment quantitative frameworks

A big part of due diigence involves prudent reading and digesting voluminous amounts of complex business documents.

The analysis of natural language documents is mostly carried out manually under the constraint of bounded rationality. This manual process is imprecise, time-cost intensive and vulnerable to bias.

SiteFocus, applying its Symbolic Artificial Intelligence technology, overcomes this major obstacle in M&A and/or LBO transactions.

Automate qualitative due diligence

By applying the principle set forth by symbolic logic to process natural language documents, one can gain clarity on semantics and detect fallacies.

Each CIF C-Suite Intelligence Report automatically constructs a trail of semantics over the target time period, understanding the success and failure of business strategy and trajectory.

This enables decision makers to continuously evaluate the viability of the leveraged buyout.

CIF C-Suite Intelligence Reports