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There's a question that kept coming up at this year's IR Society annual conference in London. Nobody said it out loud, but you could feel it in every session: are we actually keeping up?
Not just with new tools — though AI came up in almost every conversation. It's more than that. Some IR teams are still running the job the old way: manage the calendar, draft the earnings release, wait for investors to call. Others have figured out that the job has changed shape entirely. They're in the rooms that matter, they're using the tools that free up their time for that, and they treat every investor, activist or not, as a relationship worth building rather than a problem to manage.
This conference kept circling back to that same split. Here's what stood out.
The elephant in the room: smaller pools of domestic capital
The UK's stock market has a problem: companies keep getting bought and taken private, and not enough new companies are coming in to replace them.
Paul Walker, Chair of Relix and Ashtead Group, opened the conference by pointing out just how much bigger the US market is than London's. That's not new information on its own, but it matters because of what a bigger market with deeper pools of investor money can do. In the US, that scale lets companies grow into trillion-dollar giants without ever needing to leave the public market. In the UK, that kind of capital isn't there in the same way, and it's part of why so many British companies end up getting bought out instead of growing into that scale themselves.
In the panel exploring themes and trends in UK equities, Alice Squires, Head of Global Investor Advisory at Rothschild & Co. shared that 29 UK-listed companies received a takeover offer — down from 54 the year before. Fewer companies overall, but the pattern behind it is the same one driving concern across the market. British companies are being bought by outside investors — mostly from the US, Australia, and Scandinavia — rather than by British investors.
Why does that matter? Because it usually means domestic investors aren't putting enough money into UK companies to keep them well-funded and independent. When that funding gap exists, it makes those companies cheaper and easier for outside buyers to acquire. Squires called this the "go big or exit conundrum" — UK companies either need to grow large and well-capitalized enough to stand on their own, or they become takeover targets.
The good news is that London is still a place global investors want to put money into. But if it wants to keep companies from leaving, the conversation kept coming back to two fixes: get everyday retail investors more engaged in the market, and encourage more UK investment firms to back British companies directly, rather than leaving that job to buyers overseas.
AI: revolution, bubble, or both?
Nobody fully agreed on this one, which made it one of the more honest conversations of the day. Simon French, Chief Economist and Head of Research at Panmure Liberum, floated the bubble argument and acknowledged it needs a catalyst to burst, which nobody can quite identify yet. Panmure Liberum's research argues AI is transformative and disruptive in ways nobody can fully contain, but that valuations across listed and unlisted AI companies have run well past what the fundamentals support. Their read: the bubble hasn't burst yet, and won't this year, but the cracks are starting to show in a handful of stocks.
However, Adam Avigdori, Director and Portfolio Manager at BlackRock, pushed back. He argued this is real, useful technology. Maybe branding it as a bubble misses what's actually happening underneath the spending.
Paul Walker offered the number that cut through the debate either way. Microsoft now runs 550,000 AI agents alongside its 450,000 employees. Three years ago, that number was zero. Whatever you call it — bubble, revolution, or something in between — the scale of that shift is already real. The question for any business now isn't whether AI matters. It's what it means for how you operate today, and what it'll mean in two years.
The IRO has the most complete view in the building —own it
This came through in almost every session, but the session focused on driving board-level influence as an IRO made it most explicit. What’s Sarah Willet’s approach? As Head of IR and Corporate Strategy at Coca-Cola EuroPacific Partners, if she needs her chair, she'll WhatsApp him. Casual access, built on trust. For everything else, a formal quarterly conversation will do.
That kind of access isn’t just handed out. It’s earned by what you can bring to the table: the IRO is arguably the only person in a business with a truly complete, external view of how the company is perceived — by investors, analysts and the market. That view is leverage. Use it, and doors open. Sit on it, and you’ll keep getting invited to the calendar meetings, not the ones that matter.
If IR is falling behind anywhere, it's here — mistaking a seat at the table for something that gets granted rather than claimed. Push open the closed doors. Request a seat in the meetings that matter. Bring the view only you have.
Activists are a signal you missed something
One of the most interesting reframes of the day came in the activism session, where panelists argued that the phrase "activist investor" has become more noise than signal. The norm has shifted. Engaged shareholders with a strong thesis are just... investors now. Dan Homan, Head of IR at Currys, put it simply: any investor who's interested in your business and brings ideas is, in some capacity, an activist. That's not a crisis. That's someone who cares.
But the practical implication runs deeper than just a language shift. If activism is just engaged investing, then the way IR teams have traditionally approached it is the wrong frame entirely. The better question is why that shareholder felt the need to push in the first place. An activist showing up is rarely the beginning of the story.
That's where keeping up actually shows up: in the engagement work done long before any pressure arrives.
Do the work early. Know your shareholder base. Understand what they’d push on before they have to say it out loud. If the groundwork is there, the pressure becomes manageable. Sometimes, activists just accelerate change the company was already heading toward anyway.
Your next investor is probably on their phone right now — and they've never heard of you
This topic didn't get its own session, per se, but the theme ran underneath almost every conversation about the UK market's problems.
Retail investors are a massive, underleveraged audience, and the bar for reaching them is surprisingly low.
Right now, retail investors largely go off, for lack of better word, vibes. They know Tesla. They know the big names. But compelling UK companies that might genuinely outperform? Most retail investors have never heard of them. That's partly a capital markets problem, but it's also an IR problem. The opportunity is sitting there for teams willing to meet that audience where they are: short videos, plain-language materials, digital-first storytelling. No need to dumb things down. Just make them accessible.
Which is a great segue to something that came up often throughout the day. Your website? Consider it the first handshake. Before any investor asks for a meeting, they've already been to your website. And that means they've already formed an opinion. If the information isn't there, or it's buried, or it reads like it was written for a compliance team rather than a human being, you've probably already lost them.
So, are we keeping up?
Some teams are. They're claiming the strategic seat, reaching new audiences, and using better tools to do it. Others are still operating like the job is about managing the calendar and drafting earnings releases.
The gap between those two groups is only going to widen. Don’t be left behind.
