At the Forefront: How AI Is Changing Investment Research With Brightwave CEO Mike Conover

June 12, 2025

Brightwave

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In the latest episode of At the Forefront: FinTech Conversations, Brightwave CEO and co-founder Mike Conover joined Forefront VP and Head of Content Sam Belden to explore how artificial intelligence is transforming the future of financial research. With more than two decades of experience in machine learning, including roles at LinkedIn, Workday and Databricks, Mike shared the story behind Brightwave’s creation, what sets the platform apart and why now is the time for investment firms to lean into AI adoption.

Watch the full episode below:

The Evolution of AI — And Why Finance Is Ready

Brightwave was built in response to a critical challenge in investment research: how can investment teams synthesize over large document collections to produce high-quality analysis faster, without sacrificing depth or diligence?

The answer lies in autonomous research agents: language model systems that do more than just search for keywords or surface summaries by actually reading and reasoning through complex documents like deal rooms, customer contracts and public filings.

Mike also reflects on the broader AI landscape, tracing how transformer-based models became the foundation for today’s most powerful tools. But the real shift, he argues, was less about model architecture or scale and more about usability: “The ChatGPT moment was not so much a function or a state change in terms of the size of the models or the underlying technology,” Mike explains. “It was a subtle change in how they were trained… that made them much more usable and interactive.”

That leap in usability accelerated adoption and rapidly reshaped expectations across entire industries. Financial institutions that were once cautious are now embracing intelligent tools faster than expected, precisely because the technology has become practical, interactive and adaptable to their workflows.

Designed for Enterprise, Built for Performance

Security and compliance are non-negotiables in finance, and Brightwave was engineered with those requirements in mind. The platform was architected by a team with extensive experience in building regulated systems and enterprise SaaS. That foundation enables Brightwave to meet enterprise-grade requirements while delivering meaningful, measurable results across two dimensions: efficiency and performance.

On the efficiency side, Brightwave helps teams scale deep research without scaling headcount by automating tasks like generating first drafts of IC memos, extracting data from contracts and identifying deal-breakers earlier in the diligence process. On the performance side, it empowers investors to dig deeper into risk factors and asset pricing with fewer blind spots and faster turnaround.

“It reads every document, every page of every document, every time,” Mike emphasizes, “so that you're starting on the 50-yard line.” That kind of depth translates into more informed conversations, stronger investment memos and smarter decisions across the board.

Advice for Firms: Experiment Early, Learn Fast

One of Mike’s key takeaways on AI was not to wait to test it. Whether you're an enterprise team or an individual professional, hands-on experimentation is key to understanding what AI can (and can’t) do.

“You’re not going to go into a conference room and… negotiate your way to an optimized AI strategy,” he says. “It’s going to be informed by time in seat with the tools and just taking a lot of different looks at the options and seeing what makes sense for us.”

That ethos of testing, iterating and building with purpose has been core to Brightwave’s product development, and it’s the mindset Mike recommends to any firm serious about staying ahead.

“If you’re on the sidelines until there are strong guarantees that… these models are infallible, and they will intuit exactly what I want, I won't have to do any prompting — the market’s going to have moved on,” he shared. “This is a time for experimentation and exploration.”