Baillie Gifford is a founding partner in Essentia’s new AI Partner Program, helping shape Essentia Data-Out, the behavioral intelligence layer that feeds decision-quality data into an asset manager’s own AI environment

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — New York and Edinburgh

Essentia Analytics, a leading provider of behavioral analytics and decision-making insights for investment professionals, and Baillie Gifford, the independent, Edinburgh-based investment management partnership, today announced a partnership to develop Essentia Data-Out (EDO), a new offering that delivers Essentia’s behavioral intelligence directly into an asset manager’s own data and AI environment. Baillie Gifford is a founding partner in Essentia’s new AI Partner Program (AIPP).

Every serious asset manager maintains an AI stack: large language models and agents processing and interpreting the firm’s proprietary and third-party data. That data is generally rich in general market and securities performance information, but very little of it describes the one thing a firm has full ownership of: the quality of its investment decision-making. 

Essentia Data-Out fills that gap. It delivers Essentia’s proprietary behavioral analytics — measures of skill and decision-making at the portfolio manager, team and firm level — into a firm’s own cloud data environment through a secure Snowflake data share, where it can enrich the firm’s own models, agents and oversight tools.

Essentia Data-Out is grounded in Essentia’s proprietary Behavioral Alpha® methodology, which is peer-reviewed and has been road-tested and refined over more than a decade with hundreds of top equity portfolio managers around the world. 

As one of the founding members of Essentia’s AI Partner Program, Baillie Gifford — an existing Essentia client — receives early access to each new EDO release and helps define the EDO roadmap, including which Essentia metrics and analyses are developed next.

“Your AI is only as good as the data it can consume,” says Clare Flynn Levy, CEO of Essentia Analytics. “Firms are feeding their AI stacks every kind of market and fundamental data, but almost none of them are including the one thing they are ultimately paid for: the quality of their own decisions. Essentia Data-Out makes that behavioral intelligence a native part of the stack. Now, a portfolio manager pondering a decision will be able to ask their AI and get a robust and reliable response from Essentia about how that decision maps to the patterns we’ve detected in their past behavior.”

“As long-term active investors, we are always looking for ways to improve the quality of our investment decision-making,” says James Taylor, Head of Investment Analytics at Baillie Gifford. “We work with partners like Essentia to bring in distinctive data and research alongside our proprietary analysis, so that we can help our investors to understand their decisions from a robust, evidence-based perspective. This helps us to systematically learn from the decisions we make, continuously improve our investment process and, ultimately, support our aim of delivering better long-term outcomes for our clients.“

Essentia is inviting a select group of AI-forward investment firms to join the AI Partner Program and help shape Essentia Data-Out as it develops. Firms interested in adding a behavioral intelligence layer to their AI stack can arrange a demonstration at www.essentia-analytics.com.

About Essentia Analytics
Essentia Analytics is a leading provider of behavioral analytics and decision-making insights for investment professionals. Its award-winning platform, backed by robust research and over a decade of experience, helps fund managers and fund investors identify and advance decision-making skill, driving better investment performance.

About Baillie Gifford
Baillie Gifford is an independent investment partnership founded in 1908 in Edinburgh, owned and run by 54 partners who all work at the firm. The firm’s mission is to find game-changing companies (both public and private) that can sustain growth and provide returns for clients over five to ten years and sometimes longer. With 1,600 staff and assets under management of £197bn (as at 30 June 2026), it has offices in Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London, New York, Shanghai, Singapore, Toronto, and Zurich.

Media Contacts
Essentia Analytics: Doug Dundas, Chief Marketing Officer, +1 (212) 235-7102, [email protected]
Baillie Gifford: Jamie Colvin, PR Manager, +44 (0) 7483 763 035, [email protected]

Behavioral Alpha is a registered trademark of Essentia Analytics Ltd.