Reportl insights / White paper
Optimising
reporting for AI
What you need to know, and why.
Executive
summary
The rise of AI is transforming access to corporate information, revealing fundamental problems with traditional reporting design processes. As a result, business-critical annual and sustainability reporting information is not reaching readers as accurately as it should. A digital-first approach is the way to optimise AI searches.
Introduction
At Reportl we work with teams preparing corporate reports, who recognise the dramatic changes brought by AI, and our conversations with them have inspired this white paper.
Navigating the white paper
We ordered the sections with a view to narrative flow, but if you would like to get swiftly to a particular topic, here’s a route map.
Section 01:
Everyone is using AI
It’s not just investors; a broad range of stakeholders are accessing reporting information in ways that make it very hard indeed not to use AI technology. AI is fast becoming a foundational technology for the way people work, study and live their lives.
Section 02:
Why AI needs digital reporting
The underpinning reasons why AI prefers digital-first reporting.
Section 03:
The evidence
An extensive academic study found that digital-first reports are cited by ChatGPT three times more frequently than PDF annual reports.
Section 04:
What investors need
In the investment community, competition is fierce and using AI is a way to outperform the market. When new digital information or technology arrives, investors are quick to respond and use it.
Section 05:
How tagging helps
Tagging, whether it be using XBRL, JSON-LD or other SEO tools, is how AI finds relevant data that matches the search request.
Section 06:
How digital-first improves quality
A digital-first approach involves taking the best aspects of a well-established control process, enhancing them and then giving the management team more time to apply those controls.
Section 07:
What lies ahead?
With AI here to stay, optimising reporting content for AI will become increasingly important and traditional processes for creating and designing reports will be replaced.
Bibliography
We are grateful to the authors of these articles, reports and studies for the hard work and insight that we have drawn upon as inspiration for the white paper.
About this white paper
This white paper was created using Reportl. A single source of content has resulted in three formats: online HTML, a PDF and a printed version of the report. We did not use AI to draft the body of our report because we believe that people are by far the best source of creativity and judgement relating to decisions about tone, wording and content. But we did use AI to help provide a starting point for an Executive Summary, which our team then adapted.