Corporate strategy overtakes hedge funds as the biggest buyer of expert calls

Corporate strategy teams now outnumber hedge fund and private equity users across the roughly 11,200 firms that buy expert calls, according to Inex One's 2025 industry report. The shift has been building for years. Product roadmaps at the major networks tell the story; the press releases still do not.

The hedge fund use case is well documented: model a thesis, pressure-test a diligence point, screen a management team before a meeting. Corporate strategy buyers want something different. They ask about pricing benchmarks for a new SKU, alternative suppliers in Mexico or Vietnam, how a competitor structures its enterprise sales org, what regulatory approvals look like for a Brazil entry. They read transcripts more than they sit on live calls. They evaluate the spend over a 6-12 month decision cycle, not a single earnings quarter.

The procurement layer is the part most outsiders miss. A hedge fund buys an EN seat the way it buys Bloomberg: the PM signs, the analyst uses it, no one runs an RFP. A corporate strategy team buys it the way it buys Gartner or Forrester, annual contract, named seats, a procurement officer asking what the per-seat ROI looks like and how the platform compares to McKinsey Insights, IDC, and the in-house consulting bench. The data the buyer wants in the dashboard is not 'how many calls did the analyst take' but 'what decisions did this inform.'

The networks have been adjusting in public, even when they don't frame it that way. GLG opened a San Francisco office in 2024 explicitly to serve tech and consulting clients, and its AI implementation survey of 110 senior leaders is a corporate-strategy artifact, not a hedge-fund one. Dialectica made the FT 1000 list and has been publishing sector reports, including a 2026 healthcare software outlook, that look like McKinsey teasers. Guidepoint hit 100,000 transcripts and now markets the library as a research product in itself. AlphaSense's $500M ARR run rate and its enterprise dashboard cadence target the same buyer that used to belong to Gartner and Forrester.

None of this is being announced as a strategic pivot. The press releases out of the major networks still read like hedge-fund coverage: a new healthcare-services PM joined, a former biotech analyst is taking calls. But the pipeline of product launches, transcript libraries, sector dashboards, AI summarization layers, sentiment tooling, is engineered for a buyer who reads 200 transcripts a quarter to brief a CEO, not a buyer who needs three calls before an earnings print.