Customer stories · Leading hyperscaler, 4 mins

How Artificial Societies helped a hyperscaler prepare for its earnings call

Challenge

What will the market ask, and how will it react, before the call happens?

Artificial Societies supported the investor relations team of a leading hyperscaler ahead of a quarterly earnings call. Revenue was about to double year on year, but rising memory costs meant the margin guide was coming down at the same time. The team had prepared remarks, a guidance range and a view of what the market would fixate on. What they could not do was test any of it, due to regulation around selective disclosure. The audience that mattered was small, regulated and unreachable.

Which questions will analysts actually raise, and how will each of them phrase it?
Will the margin reset dominate the call, or will the market look past it?
How will investors react to the growth guide and to each version of the script?
Where does our internal view of investor concerns diverge from the market’s?

Solution

Four standing societies built around one stock

The client needed to hear from everyone who could be on the call, and from the key audiences who would frame the story afterwards, without revealing anything beforehand. To achieve this, we built four artificial societies around the company’s stock — Sell-Side Analysts, Buy-Side Investors, Corporate Ecosystem and Financial Media — each persona matched one-to-one to a real individual using public data and social activity.

Sell-Side Analysts
Every analyst who has asked a question on the company’s last eight earnings calls.
14 personas
Buy-Side Investors
The portfolio managers, analysts and CIOs at the institutions that hold the stock.
250 personas
Corporate Ecosystem
The customers, suppliers, partners and policymakers around the company, including a subgroup of its own employees.
570 personas
Financial Media
Business and finance journalists at major outlets and specialist trade titles.
1,600+ personas

We ran a series of surveys and experiments across three stages: the question each analyst was most likely to ask, investor reaction to the guide and to alternative versions of the prepared remarks, then how the story would travel through the ecosystem and the press. Because every persona is simulated, we could test unreleased numbers and draft scripts that could never be shown to a real investor. Insights were captured at both an aggregate and individual persona level, enabling analysis by audience, question and script version.

Impact

A rehearsed call, and a correction to the company’s own read of the room

Artificial Societies delivered insights backed by nearly 125,000 individual responses from personas across four societies. The company expected the margin reset to dominate the call. The simulated analysts largely looked past it and pressed instead on the durability of demand and the scale of the company’s financing commitments. On the live call, the questions ran the same way. For each analyst likely to be on the call, the team had the question they were most likely to ask, in their own words. Script testing showed which version of the prepared remarks landed best with investors. The simulated press coverage matched the real next-morning framing: growth in the headline, the margin reset as a cost story, financing as the emerging risk. Results were delivered as a pre-call briefing, with full access to the Artificial Societies platform to re-run scenarios and re-test the script as the numbers firmed up. Because the societies are standing rather than one-off, they were ready for the next quarter. Artificial Societies delivered results within 48 hours, with no draft, number or script ever leaving our private, secured environment.

2,400+
AI personas across four societies
125,000
Responses
48 hours
Start to finish

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