S&P Global Market Intelligence: Initiation of Coverage

GAII Intelligence defines the AI Research & Intelligence market as software that applies generative and agentic AI to the research process of professional investors: locating candidate securities, assembling and interrogating evidence, producing written analysis with traceable sources, and monitoring positions once held. Buyers are hedge funds, long-only managers, multi-manager platforms, family offices and allocators; the economic buyer is typically the chief technology officer, the head of research, or a portfolio manager with a technology budget.

Capabilities we treat as mandatory

• Evidence retrieval at scale: the ability to search and reason across regulatory filings, transcripts and news, and across documents the client supplies.
• Source traceability: every material claim in an output must be reachable back to the passage that supports it.
• Institutional data handling: a stated position on where client data goes, how long it is held, and whether it is used for model training.

Capabilities we treat as differentiating

• Persistent state: the system remembers a thesis, a coverage list or a position between sessions and acts on it without being re-prompted.
• Workflow surfaces: delivery inside the applications analysts already use — the spreadsheet, the research management system, email and messaging.
• Owned or exclusive content: material that a competitor cannot obtain by signing the same third-party contract.
• Published evaluation: a measured, disclosed accuracy methodology rather than an assertion of quality.

This note rates S&P Global Market Intelligence's AI offering for investment professionals — ChatIQ and AI features in Capital IQ Pro, Kensho's retrieval for AI platforms and the data those features can reach — not the division or S&P Global as a whole. S&P Global Market Intelligence competes with Bloomberg, FactSet and LSEG among incumbents, and with AlphaSense and AI-native vendors on research workflow; its Visible Alpha consensus is a differentiator against all of them.

The following are the capabilities and characteristics that, in our assessment, most distinguish S&P Global within the AI Research & Intelligence market. Each is drawn from publicly documented product capability, published interviews with management, or independent hands-on review.

• Retrieval design: Deterministic, identifier-anchored retrieval with line-item links to source filings; the API sees generated code, not prompts.
• Data breadth: Capital IQ, Visible Alpha driver-level consensus, ratings, 12m+ private companies and With Intelligence private-markets content.
• Distribution: Connectors in Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini Enterprise, Amazon Quick and Databricks.
• Traction: 500+ AI-connected clients and API call volume up more than five times in a quarter (company, Q2 2026).
• Evaluation heritage: S&P AI Benchmarks by Kensho (2024–25), open-sourced at retirement.
• Commitment: Kensho as a dedicated AI unit since 2018, now running the AI Data Portal.

The following are factors that prospective clients should weigh, and areas where our public review did not find sufficient evidence to reach a settled view. Several are common across vendors at this stage of the market and are not specific to S&P Global. We encourage prospective clients to raise each of them directly with the company; we have done the same, and will update this note as answers arrive.

• Native agents: ChatIQ Presentations in Labs and Portfolio Insights in beta; agentic depth trails the data layer.
• Data governance: No explicit no-training commitment, AI subprocessor list or public trust centre located.
• Certification evidence: A UK G-Cloud listing both cites ISO 27001 and states no certification; SOC 2 not located.
• Client data: Bring-your-own-content in Document Intelligence promised for summer 2026, not confirmed.
• Model disclosure: ChatIQ's underlying model is not named.
• Organisation change: Market Intelligence reorganised in July 2026 after the Mobility spin-off.

S&P Global Market Intelligence's AI work is led by Kensho, acquired in 2018, which built S&P AI Benchmarks (2024–25) and the LLM-ready API that became the AI Data Portal in July 2026. ChatIQ and Document Intelligence brought generative AI into Capital IQ Pro from November 2024.

Since July 2025 S&P data has reached Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini Enterprise, Amazon Quick and Databricks, and Visible Alpha consensus joined the MCP offering in October 2026. AI-connected clients rose about 70% in the second quarter of 2026 to over 500, with API call volume up more than five times (company).

Company-reported figures are shown as such and are not independently verified. Verification is carried into the vendor questionnaire.

S&P offers AI inside Capital IQ Pro and supplies retrieval to external AI platforms. Figure 2 sets out our assessment of how it maps onto the investment workflow.

ChatIQ and Document Intelligence

Conversational research and multi-document Q&A with citations in Capital IQ Pro (2024–25).

Kensho AI Data Portal

Deterministic and adaptive retrieval for agents; Visible Alpha added October 2026.

Office tools

Excel Formula Builder AI and ChatIQ Spreadsheets; ChatIQ Presentations in Labs (October 2026).

Platform connectors

Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini Enterprise, Amazon Quick and Databricks.

Scope of the product today

We did not locate an explicit no-training commitment, confirmed client document ingestion or general availability of native agents.

Kensho supplies data and grounding rather than models: deterministic retrieval generates structured API calls, adaptive retrieval routes multi-step agent tasks, and identifiers anchor every answer. Financial line items link to the original filings in Capital IQ Pro.

Kensho published S&P AI Benchmarks from 2024 and retired them in 2025 when frontier models saturated them; no product-level accuracy is published.

Content spans filings, transcripts, Capital IQ fundamentals and estimates, Visible Alpha consensus from 250+ brokers, aftermarket broker research, credit ratings, 12m+ private companies and With Intelligence private-markets documents.

Third Bridge expert content is accessible in Capital IQ; client document ingestion has not been confirmed.

S&P fits modelling, consensus and document research, delivered in Capital IQ Pro, Excel or the analyst's own assistant.

Idea generation and monitoring are not yet agentic.

S&P offers SAML SSO, MFA, 12-month audit data and private-cloud deployment for Capital IQ Pro, and its retrieval API never receives natural-language prompts. Figure 3 sets out what our public review located.

We would encourage buyers to request attestation reports, a no-training commitment and ChatIQ's model provider.

The offsetting factor is privacy by design in the retrieval API.

Pricing is not generally published; UK public-sector listings show Capital IQ Pro from £45,000 a year for up to five users, with API access at 25–75% extra.

AI features are included in the subscription; the retrieval API is licensed separately with consumption elements.

S&P sits in the Emerging quadrant of the matrix, 0.33 below the market-strength boundary (Y 7.17).

GAII Research & Intelligence coverage plus the Established Platforms group (Bloomberg, FactSet, LSEG, S&P Global MI, MSCI), 21 October 2026. Established Platforms are rated only on their AI offering for investment professionals and the data it can reach — not on company size or non-AI products.

11.1 Where S&P Global is strongest relative to peers

• Against other incumbents, on retrieval design and consensus depth.
• Against AI-native vendors, on proprietary data and private markets.
• Against Bloomberg, on openness to AI platforms.

11.2 Areas of narrower functional focus

S&P has built its data layer ahead of native agents and governance disclosure.

• Agents: in Labs or beta.
• Governance: no no-training commitment located.
• Client data: not confirmed.
• Commercial: limited price visibility.

Scores are on a 0–10 scale. Each dimension score is the mean of its sub-criteria, and the GAII Overall Score is the weighted mean of the six dimensions. The detailed sub-criteria scores that build each dimension are set out in Appendix A.

These are the areas where our public review did not find sufficient evidence to form a settled view. We have put them to the company and will update this note when they are answered. Prospective clients may find them a useful agenda for their own evaluation call.

• A no-training commitment for client data and prompts.
• ChatIQ's model provider.
• SOC 2 and ISO 27001 reports.
• AI subprocessors and data residency.
• Client document ingestion status.
• General availability of ChatIQ Presentations and Portfolio Insights.
• Product-level accuracy evaluation.
• MNPI controls for ChatIQ.
• AI and API pricing.
• Post-reorganisation AI leadership.
• Status of Spark and Scribe.
• Broker-research provider count.

This note is an assessment of a vendor against a defined framework, not a recommendation to buy or to decline. The following are the considerations we would put at the centre of an evaluation of S&P Global specifically.

If you are a fundamental equity manager

• Use S&P data in your own assistant via MCP.
• Test Visible Alpha consensus through agents.
• Check line-item citations.

If you are responsible for technology or vendor risk

• Open with Figure 3; request a no-training commitment.
• Review API privacy design.
• Confirm attestation reports.

If you are assessing the category rather than the company

• Identifier-anchored retrieval reduces hallucination in numbers.
• Consensus data is moving into agents.
• Private-markets data is a new battleground.

Each dimension score in Section 12 is the mean of the sub-criteria below.