You sent the research. Who actually read it?

"The Copilot integration has been a great first step toward enabling our Strategic Intelligence team with AI. It helps us answer ad hoc questions from stakeholders and serves as a strong starting point when we need industry context."

Pacific Life is a Fortune 500 insurer with $16.1B in annuity sales and $766M in life insurance sales in its Consumer Markets division last year. Behind those numbers is a Business Strategy team with a specific mandate: monitor the external environment (macroeconomic trends, competitors, distribution partners, regulation, and technology) and translate that into actionable recommendations for leadership.

That kind of work builds up a lot of institutional knowledge over time. The challenge is making sure it doesn't just sit there.

Building something centralized

Pacific Life's Consumer Markets team partnered with Sharpr in 2020 to create a centralized home for their strategic intelligence. The goal was straightforward: stop relying on ad hoc sharing and create a consistent, scalable way to surface relevant insights to leadership and partners.

The team now uses the platform in three distinct ways. They collect, tag, and curate intelligence across news articles, research studies, and proprietary insights, then synthesize that content into recurring newsletters and insight briefs distributed broadly across the organization. Sharpr also serves as the analyst productivity hub, a searchable repository of the team's latest thinking on every topic, so no one has to start over when a question comes in.

The third use case came in 2025, when Pacific Life added the Copilot integration, keeping their system current with the latest AI tools approved for use at the company.

Copilot as a research partner

The Sharpr and Copilot integration has changed how the team approaches research questions. Analysts can now ask questions in natural language and get synthesized answers with cited sources drawn directly from their Sharpr content library, which includes years of curated intelligence migrated into the platform alongside everything added since 2020.

The use cases are practical: answering ad hoc questions from business stakeholders, conducting trend research, providing industry context for strategy work. Copilot surfaces what the team already knows, connects it to broader themes, and gives analysts a strong, sourced starting point.

Like any evolving technology, it works best when analysts bring their own expertise to reviewing and refining the output, which is how good research has always worked anyway.

What's changed

The results Morgan and her team are seeing are meaningful, even if they're hard to put a single number on.

Search time is down. Copilot serves as the first stop for many queries, which means analysts spend less time manually browsing before finding what they need. Manual search is still part of the workflow when necessary, but the overall time spent hunting for information has dropped.

Turnaround on stakeholder questions is faster. When someone from the business asks about a competitive dynamic or a market trend, the team can respond more quickly and with more confidence, because they have a tool that pulls from a deep library of curated intelligence and returns a coherent, cited answer rather than a starting-from-scratch research request.

For a team whose job is to make the organization smarter about the world outside its walls, that's what the investment in building good infrastructure was always for.