Welcome to the latest edition of At the Forefront: Fintech Conversations!
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In this episode, Forefront VP and Head of Content Sam Belden is joined by Mike Conover, Founder and CEO of Brightwave — the AI-powered research platform helping institutional investors uncover insights faster and with more confidence. The conversation covers the evolving role of AI in finance, why usability has become a turning point for adoption and how Brightwave is enabling teams to go deeper with less manual effort.
To begin, Mike shares how his background in AI product development — from LinkedIn’s homepage to Databricks and Workday — led him to build Brightwave. “When I started this company, I expected that we would need to train foundation models, because of skepticism with respect to the suitability of general-purpose language models to do these tasks in finance,” he says. Mike saw an opportunity to bring advanced language models into investment workflows in a way that balanced precision, speed, and compliance.
That shift accelerated with a recent leap in user experience. Mike explains that while the underlying technology had been improving steadily, what really made the popularity of AI boom is “how usable it has become.” Through interfaces like ChatGPT, AI systems suddenly started to feel intuitive — and that shift brought a wave of new expectations. “Language models have just redefined what is possible, and I have been surprised by the speed with which the market’s expectations have caught up to what the technology is capable of,” Mike notes.
Brightwave is built with those expectations in mind, while also meeting the foundational requirements of enterprise-grade financial technology — especially around data security, compliance, and auditability. “Everything we’ve done at Brightwave has been built to exchange grade, security, privacy, and compliance specs,” Mike says. He also shared that t the platform was architected by a co-founder with deep infrastructure experience in highly regulated environments.
The conversation then turned to real-world applications of the platform. Brightwave helps firms streamline time-consuming tasks like parsing investor decks, HR contracts and financial memos. Mike explains how Brightwave produces research reports: “If I have 25 questions that go into my investment committee memo, get me an initial draft of that IC memo based on those factors with the push of a button — and Brightwave is going to read every document front to back.” The speed with which the tool reads every document, he explains, not only boosts throughput but also allows companies to spend their time more wisely.
Sam and Mike also explore how Brightwave is changing the pace of financial research more broadly. Instead of analysts spending hours combing through dense filings, teams can now synthesize findings across hundreds of documents in minutes. “You’re starting on the 50-yard line,” Mike says.
To close the conversation, Mike offers practical advice for firms looking to adopt AI. He recommends starting with specific, repeatable workflows that can be measured over time — whether that is automating investment memos, analyzing competitive positioning or generating tear sheets. For individuals, he suggests simply using tools like ChatGPT consistently and paying attention to patterns in how the models work. “There’s not a page in the ChatGPT instruction manual that says you can do this, but I think having exposure and reps with the technology will in your personal life will give you a better sense for what is possible,” he says.
For more on how Brightwave is helping investment teams uncover high fidelity insights and accelerate decision making, visit www.brightwave.io.
See below for a breakdown of what was discussed. Happy listening!
Timestamps:
1:09 – Mike Conover on his AI career background and founding Brightwave
4:44 – How mainstream AI usability is transforming finance
8:08 – How Brightwave meets enterprise security and compliance standards
11:16 – Real-world use cases of Brightwave in financial workflows
13:43 – Automating financial research: A look inside Brightwave’s capabilities
15:58 – Use cases for AI in daily personal life
17:40 – Advice for enterprises adopting AI today
