The Era Of Robot-Generated Reports Has Begun

The era of robot-reporting has begun.

There are now 163 different websites that feature companies' quarterly earnings reports generated by Automated Insights, the company hired by the Associated Press to take over writing its earnings stories.

Every three months, public firms publish quarterly financial results, showing how much money they brought in. The companies themselves publish a whole bunch of different numbers, but shareholders usually end up only looking for a few: earnings (or net income), earnings per share, and revenues. They also want to know how those figures compared with analysts' expectations and with prior results.

So, you don't necessarily need a live body to pull these figures and organize them into something another person could digest.

A quick glance comparing reports reveals how AI's formula works. Here's what AI's Hasbro earnings report from this morning looks like on MSNMoney...

And here's what it looks like for Allergan.

AI says it expects to cover 3,300 companies this quarter.