LexisNexis is betting that generative AI can save time for business researchers digging deep into the data on its platform—and it’s secured rights deals with several big-name news outlets to further that goal.
The data and analytics company announced the wide rollout of a new tool this week that aims to help corporations collect, summarize, and draw insights from information like financial documents, earnings call transcripts, and news articles. The platform said it’s landed GenAI rights deals with publishers like the Associated Press, Gannett, and McClatchy, which allows for their content to serve as reference fodder for the tool in exchange for a royalty fee from LexisNexis.
Not to be confused with Lexis+ AI—LexisNexis’s new tool for legal research—Nexis+ AI is not actually trained on articles from those news publishers, unlike recent AI deals between tech companies and publishers like News Corp, The Atlantic, the AP, and Axel Springer.
Instead, LexisNexis is tapping “out-of-the-box” models from Anthropic and OpenAI to navigate the content through a method called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), according to Snehit Cherian, CTO of global Nexis Solutions at LexisNexis.
While LexisNexis is perhaps best known for its legal data, the new tool is more aimed at business professionals like corporate strategists or consultants looking at questions like whether to enter a new marketplace or acquire a company, Dani McCormick, VP of product for Nexis Solutions, said.
“We help professionals, broadly, in corporations of all sizes find insight quickly,” McCormick said. “There’s loads of information out there, but you’re lacking time in the day to go through it all, so our job is to get you to the insight, the nugget, the gold super quick.”
McCormick demonstrated the tool with an example scenario in which a corporate strategist is assessing the electric vehicle market. The user could browse financial documents, earnings transcripts, and recent articles about electric car companies, then summarize them or pull passages from them. The user would then be left with a summarized overview that traces back to underlying sources.
Keep up with the innovative tech transforming business
Tech Brew keeps business leaders up-to-date on the latest innovations, automation advances, policy shifts, and more, so they can make informed decisions about tech.
That last part is especially notable because there is always a risk that a generative AI tool can go awry with fake information or tangents. Cherian said the company has installed a series of checks—such as a “faithfulness score” and human review for a certain random sampling—all meant to check the accuracy and relevance of information provided.
“We have a whole bunch of automated metrics in place to validate that the model hasn’t told us anything that was not part of the context,” Cherian said. “If it is, then we treat it as a hallucination, even if it is factual or correct. We will have to make sure that…the context we provide is from the exact licensed content sources that we have licensed from our publishers.”
LexisNexis isn’t the only information service looking at how generative AI can help mine content for insights. Bloomberg introduced an earnings call summarizer earlier this year, and the Washington Post recently debuted a chatbot that fields questions about the climate crisis, for instance. Countless other news orgs are also exploring uses for the tech, despite some controversy.
Cherian claims Nexis+ AI gives news outlets a way to earn royalties from surfacing existing content in new ways without forking anything over as training data.
McCormick said future work on the tool will focus on reducing the time it takes for users to reach insights, the key metric by which the company measures its performance.
“What we know is that people haven’t got time yet, tantalizingly, there is so much information that they could plow into,” she said.
Disclosure: Axel Springer owns a majority stake in Morning Brew parent company Business Insider.