Activist investors launched a record 255 campaigns globally in 2025 – a near 5% increase over the prior year, surpassing even the previous record set in 2018. In the United States alone, campaigns jumped 23% year-over-year[1]. In Canada, the number of activist campaigns increased to 67 in 2025[2]. These are not abstract statistics for investor relations professionals – they reflect an ongoing risk in the operating environment.
And yet, in the same period, the IR profession has become increasingly enamoured with a parallel trend: artificial intelligence. Sentiment tracking. Predictive targeting. Agentic workflows that can prep a non-deal roadshow with a fraction of the manual effort. The technology is genuinely impressive. It is also genuinely insufficient – on its own – for the moments that matter most.
When an activist takes a position in your company, no algorithm is going to save you. The institutional shareholders who will determine the outcome of that fight already have a view of the management team long before the 13D was filed. Trusted relationships are the key to winning a proxy contest, and these are fostered over several years and cannot be replicated by AI tools.
The Evidence Is Telling
The academic and practitioner literature on this point is consistent. Research has found that companies with a dedicated IR function face an 8% lower likelihood of a contentious escalation of an activist campaign, and a 32% lower likelihood of CEO turnover in the year following a campaign[3]. The mitigating effect of IR increases with tenure – which provides evidence that it is the relationship itself, compounded over years, which creates resilience.
IR practitioners who have sat on the other side of an activist campaign describe the same experience. Proactive and consistent engagement with major institutional shareholders throughout the year, through one-on-one meetings, investor days and non-deal roadshows, builds confidence and trust that is crucial in countering potentially false allegations. The IROs who built those relationships before the crisis had something to draw on.
What AI Gets Right
None of this is an argument against technology. AI tools have a meaningful and growing role in investor relations – and IROs who dismiss them risk a different kind of vulnerability.
Today, more than half of IROs report embedding AI into workflows, up from 30% in 2024[4]. The tools are maturing rapidly. AI now helps IR teams understand stock price movements in real time, monitor social sentiment for emerging retail narratives, target the right investors based on ownership pattern analysis and prep earnings scripts with competitive benchmarking. These are genuine efficiency gains. For lean IR teams, the ability to spend less time on administrative work and more time in rooms with investors is precisely what the tools promise to deliver.
The case for AI in IR is not that it replaces human work. It is what creates the space for the human work to happen. An IRO who spends fewer hours manually tracking ownership changes has more hours to call the governance lead at a large passive fund – not because there is an upcoming vote, but because that relationship needs maintenance. The intelligence is automated. The conversation is not.
Be Aware of Over-Reliance
The danger is in mistaking the intelligence for the relationship.
Knowing that a fund holds your stock is not the same as knowing what its governance team is actually concerned about, how the team felt after your last earnings call, or whether there is trust in your CFO's credibility on guidance. Sentiment scores aggregate public signals. They cannot tell you what was said in a private meeting six months ago, or whether particular portfolio managers have been privately skeptical of your strategy and just needed an activist to crystallize their dissatisfaction.
There is a version of the AI-enabled IRO that is very efficient and very isolated – processing signals, generating outputs, sending well-targeted communications – but spending less actual time with the humans on the other side of those communications. The danger here is that AI becomes a substitute for presence rather than a complement to it.
The research finding that IRO tenure is associated with greater activism deterrence is instructive here. Tenure is not a proxy for sophistication. It is a proxy for accumulated relationship capital – the kind that cannot be imported from a data platform. It accrues in conversations. It is damaged by turnover, by inconsistency, by the impression that the IR function is simply a one-way communication channel rather than a genuine dialogue.
The Discipline That Matters
If there is a practical takeaway for IROs in an era of record activism, it is this: use the tools to earn more time for relationships, and then actually use that time effectively.
Maintain consistent, open dialogue with your largest institutional holders throughout the year – not just during proxy season or in the middle of a campaign. If an activist does take a position, it is challenging to form that relationship under fire. Proactively commission perception studies. Do the unglamorous work of getting in front of governance teams at passive funds that, while they may not trade your stock, hold enormous voting power and will often be the swing vote in a contested election.
When an activist does appear – as the data suggest is increasingly likely – remember that the IRO's role is not to win an information battle. It is to activate a trust bank that should already be full of deposits over many years. AI can help you understand and build your strategy, but only relationships can determine the outcome.
The best IR programs treat technology as an enabler and human connection as the product. In a record year for activist campaigns, the distinction has never mattered more.