Transforming Economic Intelligence

How Andersen Institute Unlocked Real-Time Insight into Corporate Tariff Impacts with AI

Executive Summary

The Andersen Institute worked closely 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 LLMs, Andersen built an AI-enabled economic intelligence platform capable of analyzing nearly 1,500 earnings call transcripts and converting qualitative executive commentary into structured, measurable insights.

Within weeks, the Institute gained a market-wide view of tariff impacts and mitigation strategies, 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, across costs, supply chains, pricing, productivity, and investment decisions.

Yet traditional economic analysis tools were not built for this moment. Researchers 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 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, Andersen Consulting assembled 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 the 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, the Institute could finally examine qualitative and quantitative information in a single research context.

AI That Turns Qualitative Commentary into Structured Economic Signals

Andersen deployed 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 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, Andersen 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 Institution’s quarterly research cycle. New earnings call transcripts are now automatically ingested, processed, and added to longitudinal analysis modules.

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.

Together, these outcomes have transformed the Institute’s research function into a high-speed, AI-enabled economic intelligence capability able to quantify market sentiment, validate it against real outcomes, and support strategic decision-making with greater clarity and rigor.

A New Standard for Economic Intelligence

Through its collaboration with Andersen Consulting’s AI & Advanced Analytics practice, this 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 the Institute’s Head of Research. “It has fundamentally changed how we assess economic shocks and communicate insights to leadership.”

Looking Ahead

The institution 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.

Deliver Value to Your Organization with AI in Weeks, not Years

Andersen Consulting is a global consulting practice providing a comprehensive suite of services spanning corporate strategy, business, technology, AI transformation, and human capital solutions. Andersen Consulting integrates with the multidimensional service model of Andersen Global, delivering world-class consulting, tax, legal, valuation, global mobility, and advisory expertise on a global platform.