Perplexity AI unveiled a finance vertical yesterday. Wall Street should take note. 

There are five big points to unpack:

-How it was announced

-Who announced it 

-What it looks like

-What it can do

-What is next 

THE ANNOUNCEMENT: The new feature was unveiled via a tweet that included a video of someone clicking through charts of Nvidia’s stock price, fundamental data and news. It’s yet another example of how X is becoming the place to announce product news, especially in tech. 

WHO: The tweet was sent by CEO Aravind Srinivas. It’s part of a growing communications trend that we are seeing in which CEOs announce products. That’s happened recently with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Benioff from SalesForce.

HOW IT LOOKS: The demo was done in dark mode, which is NOT the default for Perplexity but IS the standard for Wall Street. That look was pioneered by Bloomberg and later followed by others. It suggests an awareness that Perplexity understands and is interested in the professional market. 

WHAT IT DOES: It’s a slick interface that makes it easy to click to see news, financial data and competitors. Truth be told, however, it doesn’t yet do much more than Google Finance or Yahoo Finance. That raises an obvious question: Why go to the trouble of building and announcing it? And that is probably best answered by the next point.

WHAT’S NEXT: Srinivas answered that question in the comments to his own tweet and it’s clear he doesn’t lack ambition. He tweeted: “Much more work needs to be done to be a complete end-to-end market research tool: ingesting 10q and 10k, and allowing for deeper research on proxy statements, annual reports, and earnings. To come soon.”

At this point, Perplexity’s finance vertical lacks the most basic Gen AI element, which is a way to query the data in an interactive way with questions. I’m sure that is in the works.

Perplexity has selected finance for what appears to be its first vertical. It is promoting the feature  with color designs familiar to Wall Street and it elevated it by having its CEO post about it on X.

All that may mean nothing.

But more likely it suggests there is a lot more to come.