Recently, I blogged about the role of AI in proxy fights and the impact it has relative to proxy advisors. The blog was based on a recent Andreessen Horowitz “a16z chart of the week” – which itself piggybacked off a report from Kekst CNC.
Kekst CNC examined how four different AI models analyzed the arguments that each side of a proxy fight made – and found that results varied. No surprise there for me. How you say something understandably impacts how a reader might read something – including how a LLM might be persuaded – as people read the same thing differently.
What surprised me was what types of communications appeared to be most influential to a LLM. Going beyond the power of the traditional proxy advisor recommendations – which is cited in #3 on page 8 of the report as being the most influential – #6 on page 10 notes that “The single most important channel to articulate arguments that affect AI recommendations is the press release.”
The analysis below this “press release” bottom line is worth reading: “While the influence of the legacy press release has moderately waned in recent years through the creation of direct-to-stakeholder channels, AI has breathed powerful new life into it – a trend that is borne out in the context of proxy fight
searches. Releases represented nearly one-third of all citations informing AI responses – whether through direct links to the newswires through which they were issued, or through full reprints on automated websites.
Notably, the analysis did not uncover obvious volume “fatigue” among engines, i.e., consuming a maximum number of press releases to inform its recommendations. The breadth of attribution was typically a function of the depth of the engine’s analysis – Gemini’s analyses are more detailed, for example, while Perplexity’s are shallower. Sourcing can also change meaningfully when running the same search multiple times or by different users. A valuable subject for further study and testing is whether companies and activists should consider increasing their rate of press release issuance in contested situations to “flood the zone” with content deemed most credible by AI engines.”
