How an AI Disclosure Search Tool is Taking the Governance World by Storm

ERIC, Equilar’s AI Search Tool, Paves the Way for a New Era of Disclosure Research

February 27, 2025

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The corporate governance landscape is constantly evolving, requiring companies to keep pace with new SEC regulations and disclosure requirements. At the same time, investor pressure remains a steady force, further amplifying the need for companies to adhere to strong governance principles and implement policies that align with shareholder expectations. Public filings—such as proxy statements and Form 10-Ks—play a crucial role in demonstrating regulatory compliance while also serving as a platform to communicate how companies are addressing key governance priorities, including executive compensation, ESG, board composition and more.

The most effective companies will review disclosures of policies from industry peers and other similar companies to better grasp the standards set forth by the market. However, the challenging part is sorting through thousands of SEC filings that can often contain hundreds of pages each. Manually reviewing these documents is neither efficient nor cost effective.

Last summer, Equilar launched ERIC, an AI search tool designed for governance professionals to help simplify and expedite the process of disclosure analysis. Using ERIC is simple. Clients pose a question to ERIC and select various criteria filters, such as industry, revenue and other key metrics, allowing for precise and relevant data extraction. ERIC responds to inquiries in seconds with disclosure snippets for each individual company, along with cross-peer group summaries.

Since its launch, Equilar clients have posed thousands of questions to ERIC on a wide range of topics. Thus far, executive long-term incentive plans have been the most searched topic, accounting for 13.5% of inquiries, followed closely by annual bonus plans at 13.4%. In this post, we’ll share a few common prompts that Equilar clients have asked ERIC to address.

Identify companies that made changes to their long-term incentive structure in response to shareholder feedback.

Which companies enforce penalties or restrictions on executives who have not met their stock ownership holding requirements?

Which companies had robust and formalized orientation programs for new board members?

Which companies use an ESG metric in their annual incentive plan?

Which companies have a limit either in hours or dollars for personal usage of the corporate aircraft?

Want to learn more about ERIC? Contact us for a custom overview.

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