Overview: 10
Kensho: A Hub for AI Innovation and Transformation

Kensho.com

Since becoming part of S&P Global in 2018, Kensho has been building and deploying transformational Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions for S&P Global and external clients. Kensho has had a transformative impact on S&P Global by deploying state-of-the-art Machine Learning (ML) techniques that allow employees and customers to unlock insights faster using data extraction, data linking, voice-to-text  transcription, and natural language processing. 

Kensho is partnering with teams across the divisions to explore opportunities to marry revolutionary technologies, like Large Language Models (LLMs), with S&P Global’s unique data assets and deep industry expertise to strengthen our competitive advantage and drive growth by accelerating product innovation and unearthing countless opportunities for automation and improving the productivity of our people.

AI and Machine Learning

Applying AI solutions that structure data and derive insights rapidly and at scale

CASE STUDIES:

  • Kensho Link has saved over 2 million manual work hours and accelerated the ingestion of key strategic datasets, expanding the size and impact of S&P Global’s data universe. In addition to helping dozens of clients with database cleaning, linking, and ingestion, Kensho Link was also leveraged during execution of the merger to resolve millions of entities across the respective data systems of IHS Markit and S&P Global. 
  • Kensho Scribe was deployed into Market Intelligence’s data and content management workflow in 2019 as part of an effort to automate and optimize the transcription of earnings calls and other company presentations. Efficiencies enabled by implementing Scribe reduced per-minute transcription cost by 50%, translating to an annual savings of $9M and 250,000 work hours. These savings enabled significant product improvements, including an increase in company coverage by 117%.

R&D: Generative AI & LLMs

Accelerating innovation with LLM Development

EXAMPLE:

  • Kensho R&D team, comprising some of the top researchers in NLP, is exploring an approach to building an in-house proprietary LLM, trained on domain-specific S&P Global data with the goal of ensuring that a foundational model provides the most reliable, accurate, transparent, and explainable results, given S&P Global’s commitment to quality and our reputation for integrity. Such an asset will accelerate product innovation and improve productivity at scale—creating innovative product offerings, optimizing data acquisition, and substantially increasing the value created for our customers.  

CASE STUDY:

  • The Kensho R&D team built a prototype conversational AI interface with the ability to generate complex code, create massive database queries from natural language prompts, and perform sophisticated question answering on some of the most complicated financial documents around, all with an emphasis on accuracy, explainability, and transparency. Kensho has identified numerous opportunities to integrate LLMs in S&P Global product offerings, such as Market Intelligence’s Capital IQ Pro, with the goal of augmenting the discoverability of data and insights for customers.

Data Visualization

Make data discoverable

EXAMPLE:

  • Document Viewer is an AI-powered document-viewing platform that facilitates the efficient discovery and extraction of relevant information from large volumes of text—enabling timely, fact-based decision-making. It includes smart natural-language search with synonym support, search across all company documents, keyword matches within tables, and other features for quickly locating essential information. 

CASE STUDY:

  • Document Viewer, an AI-enabled workflow tool on S&P Capital IQ Pro that enables users to search across and extract relevant insights quickly and efficiently from textual content, went live in 2021. Since the launch, 70 million documents have been processed onto the platform with ML capabilities such as text and table extraction (Kensho Extract) and entity recognition (Kensho NERD), providing next-generation interaction features to users.

New Foundational AI Capabilities 

Transforming business processes through innovation

EXAMPLES:

  • Kensho Extract,  released in 2023, is a leading AI solution that allows users to structure and access both text and tables from documents. Utilizing sophisticated ML models, Extract converts complex PDF documents into easy-to-use machine-readable formats. Extract is built with finance and business in mind, leveraging S&P’s deep repository of financial documents, enabling it to unlock insights from complicated documents in the business and finance domains. Extract has been leveraged to improve platforms, like Capital IQ Pro, and launch new innovative products, such as Machine Readable Broker Research and others in the textual data suite. 
  • Kensho Classify,  released in 2023, is a breakthrough AI capability that attains human-level reading comprehension at machine scale by understanding the key topics, concepts, and themes relevant to any text document. Classify’s self-teaching capabilities enable customers across industries to seamlessly customize their model’s domain of expertise, powering deep analytics and intelligent search workflows.