2026-01-25

Agentic research workflows for equity desks

The pipeline

The desk produces ~30 earnings updates per quarter. The bottleneck is never the analysis — it's the mechanical first pass: read the transcript, pull KPIs, flag deviations from expectations.

Roles

• Reader: ingests transcript, extracts segments by topic.
• Comparer: cross-references against the model and prior quarter.
• Drafter: produces a structured update following the desk's template.

The analyst reviews and edits. The pipeline never publishes autonomously.

Lessons

The hardest part wasn't the orchestration — it was the eval. Without a meaningful definition of "good enough first pass" the system optimises against the wrong target.