Earlier this month, New York City-based expert network provider GLG announced that it was launching enhanced AI-Moderated Calls, enabling clients to conduct autonomous expert interviews in 10 languages with no calendar coordination required. The AI Moderator is agentic, multi-modal, and compliant, designed to probe for nuance, follow up on expert answers, and adhere to client-set discussion guides.
The Launch of AI-Moderated Calls
GLG’s AI Moderator operates within what the firm describes as the industry’s most trusted compliance environment, emulating a human researcher while processing qualitative and quantitative feedback simultaneously. Clients can program the tool to gather either answers to open ended questions, or multiple choice, scale, and matrix-style responses, with data exported directly to Excel. After calls conclude, a single-click transcript synthesis surfaces actionable themes, with all outputs traceable to named experts and timestamps.
The 10 languages supported at launch are English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Russian, Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin. Because calls can run simultaneously across time zones and experts complete engagements at their convenience, the tool removes two of the most persistent friction points in primary research: scheduling and geographic reach. Time-to-insight compresses from days or weeks to hours.
Gemma Postlethwaite, CEO at GLG, commented on the launch of this new feature saying, “Trusted human expertise has never been more valuable, and our AI-Moderated Calls help make access to it more scalable than ever for our clients, letting them conduct critical research on any timeline.”
John Londono, Chief Product Officer at GLG, explained the development philosophy: “We design all our products to empower GLG clients and experts to do their best work within a frictionless experience, so we partnered with them directly to build and enhance a tool that understands how a great research conversation unfolds. So far, experts tell us it’s easy to use with the Moderator conducting a natural and engaging conversation, and clients say it accelerates time-to-insight to just hours.”
The AI-Moderated Calls launch follows GLG’s May 5, 2026 rollout of AI tools for its myGLG client platform, which enabled question-to-research-angle conversion and expert recommendation retrieval. Nine days after that, on May 14, 2026, GLG also extended access to its Expert Content Library through Bloomberg’s ASKB platform. The August launch is the third significant AI-related product move GLG has made in 2026.
About GLG
GLG, formally known as Gerson Lehrman Group, was founded in 1998 by Yale Law School graduates Mark Gerson and Thomas Lehrman. The company originally operated as a publishing business producing industry guidebooks for institutional investors before pivoting toward expert networking after clients expressed stronger interest in direct conversations with industry specialists. Over time, GLG became one of the pioneers and largest players in the expert network industry, connecting institutional investors, corporations, consultants, and professional services firms with subject-matter experts across industries worldwide.
Today, GLG provides a broad suite of services including one-on-one expert consultations, custom surveys, private conferences, executive learning programs, board recruitment, and subscription-based expert content. The addition of AI-Moderated Calls extends that model by enabling clients to run expert interviews without human coordination on GLG’s side, scaling throughput without reducing the sourcing quality or compliance rigor that enterprise clients require when collecting insights from a wide range of human experts.
Its network reportedly includes more than one million professionals and former executives spanning sectors such as healthcare, technology, industrials, energy, consumer goods, financial services, and public policy. The firm’s clients include hedge funds, mutual funds, private equity firms, management consulting firms, and Fortune 500 corporations seeking differentiated insights for investment research and strategic decision-making.
GLG’s compliance framework has been a durable differentiator in the expert network space, particularly for hedge funds and asset managers subject to material non-public information policies. Every AI-Moderated Call runs under that same framework, with traceable outputs tied to named experts and specific timestamps. For institutional research teams that have faced regulatory scrutiny over expert network usage in the past, that traceability is not incidental; it is a load-bearing feature of the product.
Our Take
The AI-Moderated Calls launch is the most operationally significant move GLG has made in its 2026 product cycle as this roll out shows an aggressive move to remake the industry that GLG founded almost thirty years ago. The combination of 10-language support, simultaneous cross-timezone execution, and single-click transcript synthesis addresses a structural bottleneck that has defined expert network economics for two decades: the ratio of analyst hours spent coordinating calls versus extracting insights from them.
For buy-side research teams under pressure to compress due diligence timelines, the scheduling friction in traditional expert networks is a major problem. A PM running channel checks on a Japanese industrial ahead of an earnings print cannot wait three days for human schedulers to locate and brief an appropriate expert. GLG’s tool, if it delivers on the sub-hours timeline Londono describes, closes that gap in a way that pure traditional expert interviews or canned transcript libraries cannot.
The compliance architecture matters as much as the speed. Expert networks have operated under elevated scrutiny since the hedge fund insider trading investigations of the early 2010s, and many institutional compliance functions still impose strict controls on how analysts engage with third-party experts.
GLG’s emphasis on named-expert traceability and timestamped outputs builds an audit trail that compliance officers can work with. Additionally, the provision of a set of “safe transcripts” for every interview that has been automatically vetted for potential compliance issues increases the trust that buy-side compliance staff can have with the information gathered by the AI Moderator tool. That is not a peripheral feature; it is the feature that determines whether a risk committee approves deployment at all.
GLG’s AI Moderator does more than just ask a set of predesigned questions created by the buy-side analyst. The tool was trained to probe experts based on the answers they provide – a pretty sophisticated capability that should enhance the value of the feature as clients use it. The fact that set of buy-side firms that helped design the tool felt comfortable with GLG offering this feature highlights the trust their clients have in both the new tool and in GLG.
AlphaSense, which acquired Tegus in 2024 and invested over $100 million annually to expand their transcript library, is the most direct competitor to watch. AlphaSense’s August 2025 launch of its own AI agent interviewer covered similar ground, but GLG’s focus on interview depth versus merely increasing the number of transcripts it hosts in its library give it a differentiated foundation.
We suspect that GLG’s launch of its AI Moderator tool is likely to push competitors such as AlphaSights, Third Bridge, and Guidepoint to accelerate the development and launch of their own autonomous interview capabilities. Clearly, GLG’s launch of AI Moderated interviews will make this feature a “need to have” versus just a “nice to have” in the industry.
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