How one research team cut their briefing time from a day to two hours

A four-person sell-side research desk was spending roughly a full day per company update: pulling filings and recent news, reading through them, drafting a briefing note, and formatting it for distribution. Most of that day was spent reading and re-reading source material rather than writing analysis.

The team wasn't looking to automate judgment calls — they wanted the mechanical parts of the process (source-gathering, first-draft synthesis) to take less time, so analysts could spend their day on the parts that actually required their judgment.

They adopted Kingston's Investment Research workflow largely as documented: a research-and-sourcing step using a model built for live web and filings retrieval, followed by a synthesis step using a model chosen for long-document reasoning and writing quality, with a human review pass before anything went out.

The key change wasn't a new tool — it was splitting one task into two steps with two different models, instead of asking one model (or one analyst) to do both source-gathering and writing at once.

Briefing turnaround dropped from roughly a full day to about two hours, most of which is now review and editing rather than drafting from scratch. The team emphasises that the two-hour figure includes a full human read-through — nothing goes out unreviewed.

The time saved was reinvested in covering more companies per analyst, not in reducing headcount — the team's own framing, not a claim Kingston is making on their behalf.