Executive Summary

The Andersen Institute partnered with Andersen Consulting’s AI & Advanced Analytics practice to understand how the largest U.S.  tariff increase since the Great Depression was affecting corporate behavior and profitability.  Using Palantir Foundry and frontier large language models (LLMs), researchers at the Andersen Institute built an AI-enabled economic intelligence platform capable of analyzing nearly 1,500 earnings call transcripts for S&P 500 firms over the first three quarters of 2025 and converting qualitative executive commentary into structured, measurable insights.

Within weeks, the Institute gained a market-wide view of tariff impacts and mitigation strategies across individual firms, sectors, and time, something previously impossible with manual research methods.  The platform revealed consistent patterns across sectors, linked executive statements to realized margin outcomes, and established a scalable foundation for ongoing, data-driven economic analysis.

Introduction: Context and Challenge

Across global financial markets, shifts in trade policy have become major drivers of corporate performance.  When the U.S. enacted a historic tariff increase in early 2025, research teams faced immediate pressure to understand how companies were responding in terms of costs, supply chains, pricing, productivity, and investment decisions.

Yet traditional economic analysis tools were not built for this moment.  Traditionally, researchers have relied on manual review of individual transcripts, fragmented datasets, and inconsistent interpretations of executive commentary.  Capturing insights across the entire S&P 500 in a matter of weeks, let alone with consistency and rigor, was unattainable.

For the Institute, the challenge was especially complex:

• Nearly 1,500 earnings call transcripts 2025Q1-Q3 contained critical information.
• Executive discussions used varied, nuanced language that often referenced tariffs without explicitly naming them.
• Insights needed to be comparable across firms, sectors, and quarters.
• Leadership required a defensible linkage between what firms said and what actually materialized in their financial results.

The Institute needed a modern research environment—one capable of fusing heterogeneous data, extracting structured signals from unstructured text, and producing timely, repeatable insights that senior decision makers could trust.

Solution: AI-Enabled Economic Intelligence Platform Built on Palantir Foundry

Approach Overview

To meet this challenge, researchers at the Andersen Institute worked with Andersen Consulting to assemble a cross-functional AI and economics analytics team to design and deploy a next-generation research capability.  Built on Palantir Foundry and powered by advanced LLMs, the platform automatically processes earnings call transcripts, identifies tariff-related commentary, and extracts standardized, causal indicators of business impacts and mitigation strategies.

The result: a repeatable system that transforms qualitative corporate dialogue into clean, economic insight at national scale.

Unifying Disparate Data into a Governed Research Layer

Before this initiative, analysts pulled information from multiple disconnected systems like raw transcripts, sector classifications, financial statements, and quarterly margin data.  These sources had different structures, formats, and update cycles, slowing analysis and undermining comparability.

Foundry unified these assets into a single, governed research environment.  All transcripts, metadata, and financial results flowed into a consistent data model, giving analysts a reliable basis for cross-sectional and time-series analysis.  With this foundation, researchers at the Institute were able to examine qualitative and quantitative information in a single research context.

AI That Turns Qualitative Commentary into Structured Economic Signals

The Andersen Institute utilized a two-stage LLM classification pipeline to interpret each transcript with precision:

1. Stage One – Identifying Tariff Discussion: The model classified whether a transcript discussed tariffs—even when firms used indirect language.  This first pass produced a simple, defensible binary indicator for market-wide tracking.
2. Stage Two – Extracting Causal Impacts and Responses: For transcripts that referenced tariffs, the model extracted detailed variables describing:
   • Rising input costs
   • Profit margin impacts
   • Supply-chain adjustments
   • Pricing actions
   • Productivity and process improvements
   • Investment, R&D, and automation decisions

Each transcript produced 39 structured variables, enabling consistent interpretation across all S&P 500 firms.  This approach eliminated months of manual reading and coding, replacing it with a deterministic, fully auditable AI workflow.

Research Interfaces That Accelerate Economic Insight

To empower economists and analysts, the Andersen Institute working with Andersen Consulting built intuitive dashboards directly inside Foundry.  These dashboards provided:

• Sector-level comparisons of tariff impacts
• Visibility into which mitigation strategies firms used most
• Year-to-date margin analyses aligned with executive commentary
• Interactive filtering by sector, quarter, or type of pressure

Researchers gained immediate access to insights that previously required multiple tools and manual interpretation.

Rapid Deployment and Repeatable Performance

The system was implemented quickly and seamlessly integrated into the Institute’s research tools.  New earnings call transcripts are now automatically ingested, processed, and added to the earnings transcript database.

Leadership benefits from a continuous, consistent view of evolving corporate sentiment and economic pressures—without additional manual workload.

Results and Impact

The collaboration delivered measurable value across analytical, operational, and strategic dimensions:

• Market-Wide Insight Generation: The platform transformed nearly 1,500 earnings call transcripts into structured economic data, revealing how firms experienced cost pressures, adjusted supply chains, raised prices, and protected margins during the 2025 tariff shock.
• Accelerated Research Cycles: Analyses that once required months now run in hours, enabling faster executive briefings and more frequent updates on emerging economic trends.
• Operational Efficiency in Economic Analysis: Automated extraction eliminated manual transcript coding and delivered consistent interpretation across all firms within a governed Foundry environment that ensures data quality and traceability.
• Validated Economic Signal Quality: AI-extracted insights aligned with realized margin compression, confirming that sectors reporting tariff-driven profitability pressures were indeed experiencing greater year-to-date margin declines.
• Enhanced Analytical Confidence: Analysts now rely on a unified, standardized dataset instead of unstructured text, improving forecasting accuracy, scenario analysis, and communication with senior leadership.

This tool gives the Institute a faster way to measure how markets feel about economic conditions, check those signals against what actually happens, and deliver sharper, more grounded advice.

A New Standard for Economic Intelligence

Through its partnership with Andersen Consulting’s AI & Advanced Analytics practice, the Andersen Institute has demonstrated how AI and human expertise can work together to elevate economic insight.  Complex, unstructured commentary—once impossible to analyze at scale—now serves as a strategic asset.

“This platform gives our research teams the ability to interpret the corporate sector at scale,” said, Alessandro Rebucci, the Institute’s Head of Research.  “It has fundamentally changed how we assess economic shocks and communicate insights to leadership.”

Looking ahead, the Institute plans to extend the platform to incorporate real-time regulatory filings, global earnings data, alternative datasets, and predictive analytics—setting the stage for a fully AI-enabled research organization capable of responding to geopolitical and macroeconomic developments with unprecedented speed and precision.

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