Institutional Investor Research Forum 2026

Join us in Austin for MSCI's Institutional Investor Research Forum, an afternoon of thought-provoking applied analytics and research thought leadership, followed by a networking dinner.

The program will feature two in-depth sessions focused on today’s evolving investment landscape. In the first session, Will Baker, MSCI Vice President, Factor Research, will provide an overview of Event Factors and how they translate emerging real-world events and themes into systematic, time-varying risk signals within an equity factor model. His discussion will cover how unstructured information—such as news, corporate announcements, policy changes, and geopolitical developments—can be linked to securities and portfolios through topic detection, sentiment and attention signals, exposure mapping, and factor integration, with the goal of making risk models more timely, forward-looking, and interpretable.

In the second session, MSCI's Research team will explore how AI exposure manifests across institutional portfolios - and why measuring it is harder than it looks. As AI-related capital expenditure concentrates in a handful of companies and sectors, asset owners face a deceptively simple question: how much AI risk am I actually running? The answer extends well beyond the recognizable names - through infrastructure providers, adopters, and companies facing disruption - much of it invisible to traditional sector and industry classifications. We will present new research on AI exposure patterns across public and private assets, and open a discussion on what this means for how institutional investors navigate concentration, diversification, and risk in an AI-driven market.