Choosing Your AI Stack: A Framework for Institutional Investors | AlphaSense

Every investor conversation now turns to AI. The tools are proliferating, the vendor pitches are relentless, and the framework for actually choosing between them is barely formed. Andrew Walker, host of the Yet Another Value Podcast, moderates a candid working session with Dave Wang (CEO and Co-Founder of Wall Street Prompt, AI upscaling firm for hedge funds and PE) and Ben Collins (Senior Director of Solutions Marketing for Financial Services at AlphaSense) on how institutional investors should actually be building their AI stack. What you'll hear: - The single biggest mistake investors make when investing in AI: skipping the shared infrastructure that turns individual wins into firm-wide compounding advantage - Dave's 3-layer cake framework: base models (choose Claude or OpenAI, not both), public data, and private context, and why the top layer is where funds actually differentiate - 3 questions to ask before choosing any AI vendor: IT and security posture, what actually drives alpha for your fund, and how you carve out a defensible edge 6, 12, and 24 months out - Trust but verify: 2 real failure modes of general LLMs on financial workflows (data fidelity outside the well-covered universe, and context windows getting burned on data fetching instead of analysis) - When to turn a workflow into a skill, when to turn a skill into an automation, and why skill sprawl is the AI equivalent of shelfware - Hallucination by omission: the quieter failure mode where the model doesn't make it up, it just misses the piece that mattered - How sophisticated funds run parallel workstreams like a Silicon Valley engineer, and how one investor screened every name in the Korean stock market without speaking Korean - Why investors don't need to learn to code, but do need to think like an engineer - How AlphaSense sits alongside Claude and ChatGPT rather than on top of them, and why 260,000+ Tegus expert transcripts and 500M+ documents change what's possible - Career-stage advice: what to focus on as a 25-year-old analyst, a mid-career PM, and a CIO evaluating firm-wide AI strategy Plus a live walkthrough of the AlphaSense Workflow Agent Library, including Analyst Q&A Deep Dive and Bull vs Bear Debate on NVIDIA, and Dave's cross-platform sell-side triage workflow for aggregating 50 broker reports at a time. 00:00 Welcome and Speaker Introductions 02:22 Meet the Panel: Dave Wang and Ben Collins 03:53 Why AI Feels Like the Excel Moment of the 1980s 04:31 The Biggest Mistake Investors Make with Their AI Stack 07:15 The State of AI Adoption at Institutional Investors 09:24 The 3-Layer Cake: Base Models, Public Data, Private Context 11:46 How Much Private Data Should Firms Actually Capture? 12:46 Where Finance-Specific Platforms Fit in the Stack 14:52 The Cost of Weak Sources and Missing Context 16:19 3 Questions to Ask Before Choosing an AI Vendor 20:02 The Tiptoe Problem: Is There Really Alpha Left After Everyone Adopts? 21:00 Pitfalls of General Models: Data Fidelity and Context Windows 24:25 When to Turn a Workflow Into a Skill vs an Automation 27:39 Vibe Coding Your Own Software and What Happens When It Breaks 28:40 Earnings Analysis: Fast Insight vs Fast Noise 30:39 Hallucination by Omission 32:31 Why More Context From AlphaSense Improves Outputs 33:46 Real Use Cases: How Sophisticated Funds Deepen Research with AI 37:06 Running Parallel Workstreams Like a Power User 38:52 Boiling the Ocean: Screening the Korean Market Without Speaking Korean 41:57 260K+ Expert Transcripts as a Differentiator 42:47 Do Investors Need to Know How to Code? 44:00 Thinking Like an Engineer Without Writing Code 46:09 Where General AI Fails and Finance-Specific Tools Win 48:32 How AlphaSense Sits Alongside Claude and ChatGPT 51:41 Live Walkthrough: The Workflow Agent Library 54:05 Live Demo: Analyst Q&A Deep Dive on NVIDIA 55:00 Live Demo: Bull vs Bear Debate on NVIDIA 55:44 What to Try First: Grounding AlphaSense in a Bottleneck 56:09 The Sell-Side Triage Workflow: Aggregating 50 Broker Reports 58:18 One Tool to Load Up and Try Today 58:50 How AI Changes Investing by Career Stage 1:04:37 Practical Advice: How to Actually Get Better with AI Tools 1:07:07 Closing For any investor, PM, CIO, or analyst thinking about how to actually put AI to work without burning cycles on the wrong tools. --- AlphaSense is a market intelligence and search platform used by the world’s leading companies and financial institutions. Learn more at alpha-sense.com.