During a September investor tour of its Cambridge Nuclear Fabrication facility, the IR and communications teams at Aecon used sequencing animations from the operational team to show how planned upgrades to the fabrication facility would work. The company also leveraged a video to show investors how components for the Darlington new nuclear project’s small modular reactor are being fabricated for the first grid-scale SMR in North America.
“We want to give investors a more innovative and in-depth look at processes,” says Mark Schildroth, Aecon’s Director, Corporate Affairs.
He continues: “There’s a growing appetite for dynamic ways to show our work and processes, so we integrate drone and video into materials whenever we can.”
For Schildroth, who works closely with Aecon's senior IRO Adam Borgatti, the overarching goal is to use whatever’s at hand “to show the project in the best light possible.”
Given the advent of animations, video, drone shots and AI, storytelling – an art form as old as The Iliad and The Odyssey – is getting a makeover. Some savvy IR practitioners in Canada are increasingly willing to experiment with new ways to use the quickly growing array of tech tools at their disposal.
Relying less on the written word and more on images that are attention-getting and meaningful is increasingly within an IRO’s remit.
No wonder, says Susan Soprovich, F.CIRI, Partner at Clear Path Strategies in Calgary, IROs are turning to technology, which can “make what you’re doing real to people.” She continues: “People need to see to understand and believe.”
Reeling in Your Audience
Sixty-nine percent of IROs ranked storytelling among their top priorities in 2025, according to a survey published by Irwin, a FactSet company, in its IR Storyteller’s Handbook.
“If you ask any IRO the most important skills to possess, they’d all put ‘storytelling’ in the top three,” according to Mark Fasken, SVP and Co-Head of Irwin, based in Toronto. Fasken attributes a renewed passion for storytelling to “increased levels of investor scrutiny and a lot of competition for dollars right now.”
He also points out that AI is spurring IROs to hone their stories more carefully than ever. “Technology itself demands better storytelling because you have so many investors using AI-powered tools to analyze what investors are saying on the earnings call,” he notes. “You really have to make sure you’re getting the story right – and that the story you’re telling is clear and concise.”
Technology can make the arduous chore of fact-checking much easier, but it can also add an element of pizzazz that separates one company from the rest.
For Quentin Weber, CPIR, Global Head of Investor Relations at WSP Global, installing a 50-foot LED wall at his company’s February 2025 investor day was a way to make stories come to life while wowing those in attendance.
Located in a lounge area accessible during breakfast, lunch and breaks, the 4K (high definition) LED wall was fully interactive. Not only could images and videos be projected, but the wall often carried images of ‘booths’ similar to the cubicles at a conference. Approaching the wall, attendees could virtually interact with leaders, who explained projects and fielded investor questions on the spot.
The LED wall was a curiosity that also encouraged audience engagement, according to Weber. He continues: “You need to come up with something unique and something that’s appealing for people who attend because there’s a lot of competition in the market [for which investor days will be attended].”
Another example of how technology is transforming storytelling is in the creation of ‘digital twins,’ according to Gary Kalaci, CEO of Toronto-based Alexa Translations. Once AI solutions have mastered the specific communication style of an IRO, CEO, or CFO, the AI program can act as a twin and begin generating ‘original’ documents or scripts that require very little editing.
The concept of a digital twin also has implications for reaching a multilingual audience. Kalaci notes that a skilled translation is more than a faithful substitution of an English word for its equivalent in, say, Chinese. “The technology can now adjust for cultural nuances,” he explains. “You can now communicate with somebody in Chinese at almost the same speed as you can draft a message in English.”
While live translation has been hampered by inconvenient time lags, AI has erased that setback. With AI, translated subtitles typically appear in less than five seconds after the original statement was uttered.
New Twists on Video
When Karen Keyes, Head of Investor Relations at Canadian Tire, planned her company’s March 2022 investor day, all presentations were unified through graphics and media that reinforced the overarching theme ‘Better Connected.’
Technology was also critical in holding the audience’s attention. “We used videos interspersed in the presentations to break up what might otherwise seem a parade of senior managers talking,” she says.
While video is hardly new, its use by IROs is on the rise in traditional presentations – and in casual communications, too.
Ken Goff, former Head of Investor Relations at Vimeo, recently said he’d increased investor viewership by condensing what was once a 30-minute earnings video into a three-minute video of highlights.
Goff is also experimenting with sending follow-up videos after meeting individuals at conferences, rather than relying on the traditional thank-you email. “You really can view video as an opportunity to add a human face to your communications,” Goff said.
Similarly, Aecon, which won the 2025 IR Impact Award for Best Use of Social Media and Video, recently began integrating video into social media teasers for its podcast: ‘The Road to Net Zero.’
The monthly podcast, which has 2,500 unique listeners in 80 countries, may be audio only, but producers now shoot behind-the-scenes supplementary footage, or B-roll. Schildroth finds that this type of more dynamic content is something that “draws people to tune in and subscribe.”
Communicating for AI
One confounding aspect of storytelling is knowing when your message hits with a particular audience – and when you’ve missed the mark. For instance, Keyes, who finds herself regularly using AI to parse quarterly earnings or to prep for conferences, has also begun to view AI as a major audience for presentations.
Increasingly, AI is serving as a reality check, helping IROs get their arms around the cost/benefit side of launching a communications campaign. “If I put the content of my [IR communications] through AI, I can ask: ‘Is the end result I’ll achieve worth the effort?’” says Keyes.
Take the argument that AI is a critical audience for IR communications one step further and it becomes the bold proposition that AI is now the primary audience for the stories IROs are telling.
That argument is one that Chris Makuch, Senior Director for Sales in Canada for Notified, is actively advancing.
“Retail investors are putting the questions that they ask IROs in ChatGPT, and saying, ‘Give me the answer,’” says Makuch. “And so the real strategy needs to be: How do I influence the answer to be what I want it to be? That’s where I think IR is going to go in the next couple of years.”
If AI is the number one audience to reach, then it behooves IROs to study its preferences and peculiarities.
Makuch, for instance, emphasizes that AI is looking for press releases with clear headlines, bulleted points, and a tight and compact format. He also urges IROs to stop putting their press releases on IR sites in PDFs because AI doesn’t access PDFs.
Conclusion: Strategy Is Central
AI has the near-magical property of being able to take much of the guesswork out of how IR stories get heard.
At the same time, AI can now generate and analyze metrics for IROs to use and then turbocharge their communications efforts.
Specifically, Schildroth attributes a significant part of Aecon’s success in reaching investors through social media and video to attention to metrics. The company devotes time and effort to telling purposeful stories that are garnering attention. “It becomes easy to tell your story when you know who your audience is,” he says.
Metrics can also guide IROs to choose the best technology vehicle for a particular story. Irwin’s Fasken says that for companies with a high percentage of retail investors, for instance, communicating through Instagram posts and Reels (a type of short-form video popular on social media) makes good sense.
Tech advances are furnishing IROs with an endless supply of new toys, but Fasken urges them to resist the temptation to use technology for its own sake, without first determining a strategic imperative. In the best-case scenario, an IRO will adroitly match a given technology to the message being delivered. While technology is producing dazzling results, in the end it’s the IR strategy, crafted by human IROs, that truly counts.
“At the heart of it,” concludes Fasken, “IROs are storytellers and technology is one more tool.”