Do Investors Actually Use AI to Research Companies? What the Surveys Show

How many investors use AI for investment research?

The most recent broad measurement is the Investing.com survey from April 2026, which polled 938 retail investors in the US: 62% said AI tools have played a part in their investment decisions. Usage is not one-off experimentation: roughly a quarter of respondents use AI regularly and another 27% occasionally. About one in five had not used AI yet but were considering it, leaving only a small minority who ruled it out.

The Motley Fool's earlier research points the same direction from a different angle. Among 2,000 adults who had brought generative AI into their investing process, two thirds reached for ChatGPT specifically, making it the most used tool by far. The same research found younger and less experienced investors lean on these tools more than older, more experienced ones, which means adoption skews toward the investors who are earliest in forming their views.

One precision note we hold ourselves to: these are US samples. European measurement is thinner so far. There is no reason to think the behaviour stops at the Atlantic, but a claim about "investors" should say which investors were actually surveyed, so we do.

What do investors use AI for?

Mostly research and idea generation, which is exactly the part of the funnel IR used to have a window into. In the Investing.com survey, more than 60% of investors use AI to research stocks or other assets, and roughly a third use it to understand market news or generate trading ideas. Around 40% say AI lets them analyse market data faster.

Read those numbers as a description of behaviour: before an investor calls, emails, or opens the IR page, a growing share of them has already asked an AI what the company does, how it has performed, and what the risks are. The first impression increasingly forms inside that exchange.

Do investors trust what AI tells them?

Cautiously, and that caution is informative. In the Investing.com survey, 54% say they trust AI-generated insights only somewhat, 20% mostly, and just 4% completely; nearly one in four report limited or no trust. A majority say they verify AI answers against other sources. At the same time, 65% of AI users say the technology has improved their market performance, so they keep using it despite the reservations.

For IR, this combination is the actionable part. Investors use AI heavily and doubt it simultaneously, which means an answer they can verify, one with a source they can open, is worth more to them than another fluent summary. Trust is the open flank, and the source is how it is won.

What does this mean for investor relations?

Three practical things. First, the research moved, so the first version of your story an investor meets is often assembled by a system you did not brief; where those answers come from is covered in when investors ask an AI about your company, where do the answers come from. Second, the questions moved with it: every question asked to a general tool instead of to you is signal you no longer see. Third, the trust gap is your opening. Investors verify; a company that offers answers drawn from its own record, with a citation behind each point, is offering exactly the verifiability the surveys say investors want. That is what a source-grounded assistant does; the full explanation is here: what is a source-grounded IR assistant. MIRA is such an assistant, answering only from your approved company information.

The bottom line

The surveys settle the "do investors really use AI" question: a clear majority of surveyed US retail investors already bring AI into their investment decisions, most commonly to research companies, and among the AI-experienced, ChatGPT leads by a distance. They use it heavily and trust it only partly, which is the opening for companies: verifiable, source-backed answers are what this new research behaviour is missing.