Sphere wins 2026 Global Recognition Award
Sphere Partners

Use Case · Modeled Outcomes · Media & Advertising

Cutting analyst research time to speed up client delivery

Client
Composite profile: boutique media/advertising consultancy
Industry
Media, Advertising & Research Consulting
Service
Market Intelligence Copilot|Generative AI|Knowledge Retrieval

Senior analysts doing search work junior staff should have handled

~15 analysts, serving enterprise brand and agency clients with custom market reports. Analysts spent a disproportionate share of billable time searching past newsletters, decks, and spreadsheets just to find a stat, a prior forecast, or a comparable data point — before actual analysis could even begin.

The Challenge

Report turnaround times were slipping, and the firm's most experienced analysts were spending billable hours on search rather than analysis.

Search time crowded out analysis

Finding a stat or prior forecast across years of newsletters and decks routinely ate into billable hours before analysis started.

Turnaround times slipping

Report delivery windows were stretching, putting pressure on client relationships and renewal conversations.

Senior talent misallocated

Senior analysts were doing manual lookup work that junior staff should have been able to handle independently.

The Solution

The firm deployed the Copilot internally first, before any client-facing rollout, giving every analyst a single conversational front door to the full newsletter archive and structured datasets, with citations back to source so nothing had to be manually re-verified.

Estimated impact on research time and report delivery

Research time can drop from ~35% to under 15%

Of a typical report cycle — freeing up the equivalent of roughly 2 full-time analyst-days per week across the team.

Turnaround up to 4 business days faster

A shorter average report cycle is the kind of change enterprise clients tend to cite directly when renewing at a higher tier.

Junior analysts productive faster

Less dependence on institutional memory of "which 2023 newsletter mentioned that" — the citation trail does that work instead.

A lighter hidden QA bottleneck

Because every answer carries a source, senior analysts spend less time double-checking junior analysts' pulled stats.

About these figures

Figures represent the kind of impact this use case is designed to unlock — the exact numbers will depend on your team's report cycle and billable-hour mix.

This is the ROI conversation we'd expect to have with you — bring your own analyst headcount and report cycle, and let's sanity-check these numbers against it, live.

Want your analysts spending more time thinking, less time digging?

Let's talk through what a citation-backed research assistant could look like for your team. Not sure whether your archive is ready for it? Check your AI readiness →

We'd love to hear from you!

Please provide your contact details, and our team will get back to you promptly.