With two investors having recently announced they would no longer be using traditional proxy advisors in the US, I thought it would be a good time to sit down with Will Goodwin – co-founder of Tumelo – to learn more about ProxyBeacon, an AI tool that is designed to support investment stewardship teams with faster, customized and auditable proxy research and recommendations.
Romanek: How does your platform differ from traditional proxy advisor services?
Goodwin: You might be surprised to learn that the key difference is about timing. In practice, much traditional research lands weeks after a meeting is announced. By then, stewardship teams are already juggling hundreds of meetings and operating under tight deadlines -so decision-making becomes reactive rather than considered.
ProxyBeacon is designed to change that dynamic. It can generate structured, fully sourced research within a single day of a meeting being announced. A single day. That gives stewardship teams valuable time back – that’s additional time to form a view, prioritize issues and engage with companies before voting deadlines start looming.
A second major difference is how that research is produced. Traditional proxy advisors centralize research and recommendations, then distribute them at scale. ProxyBeacon allows stewardship teams to bring that work in-house. Teams design their own research reports from scratch, decide which data points matter to them, and build custom voting and governance policies based on their own priorities – rather than adapting their decisions from someone else’s framework.
Technology supports the process, but it doesn’t replace judgement. The output reflects the firm’s own context, policies and stewardship philosophy, not a standardized market view.
Transparency is another key distinction. Every answer in ProxyBeacon is tied directly back to the underlying source documents, so teams can see exactly where conclusions come from. That’s very different from a black-box recommendation that you either accept or override – and it’s critical for internal governance, audit and engagement discussions.
Goodwin: Context is critical in stewardship – and we’ve designed the system around that requirement.
First, ProxyBeacon doesn’t just ingest documents and summarize them. We continuously ingest official source filings – starting with SEC filings – and convert them into a structured, searchable corpus that preserves the original text, including tables and figures. When the system answers a question, it retrieves the most relevant sections and only generates answers using that evidence.
Every output is fully cited, so users can immediately see the exact passage it came from.
Second, humans are very much part of the loop. Internally, we use human-reviewed datasets containing tens of thousands of data points to validate accuracy and train the system, alongside automated checks that test whether answers are actually supported by the cited sources.
And importantly, the system is instructed to say when it can’t find sufficient information, rather than filling the gaps. This is an important feature. We’d rather surface uncertainty than create false confidence.
Romanek: What do the reports that you send out look like?
Goodwin: They look like the kinds of working documents stewardship teams already use – just produced faster and more consistently. There are options to keep getting the reassuring board tables, committee tables and executive comp structures that you know and love today.
Reports are template-driven, meaning teams define a set of repeatable questions – for example, around board composition, executive pay outcomes or governance risks – and those same questions are applied across issuers and meetings.
Each report is structured, factual and fully sourced. Answers are concise and standardized, so teams can compare across meetings without wading through pages of text. If something changes – a new filing, an updated disclosure – the report updates automatically.
They’re designed to support real workflows: voting committees, engagement preparation and internal review.
Goodwin: ProxyBeacon is an internal tool for stewardship teams, rather than an externally published report.
That means stewardship teams retain full control over review and usage. If something doesn’t look right, a team can immediately trace it back to the source, adjust how the question is framed or supplement it with additional analysis before relying on it for a vote or engagement.
In practice, that actually reduces risk. Instead of reacting to an external recommendation after-the-fact, teams have visibility into the full chain – from source document to output – and can intervene earlier.
Romanek: What have been the biggest surprises so far?
Goodwin: One surprise has been how quickly teams move from “we’re curious about AI” to actually using it once they see something that fits into their existing workflows. There’s been a lot of abstract discussion about AI in stewardship, but practical tools that save time without compromising a rigorous approach apparently appeal to people very quickly. Essentially immediately.
Another has been the sheer level of time savings people are getting for tasks that previously appeared impossible to automate – but AI now allows them to do so. Peer comparisons and engagement templates are things people were spending hours and hours of time on that they just aren’t anymore. Teams are under real pressure – more meetings, tighter deadlines, higher expectations – and many see this as a way to raise standards while making the work more sustainable.
Finally, the diversity of ways that teams want to use the platform. Some focus on triaging high meeting volumes, others on very detailed research – and others on testing and refining their own voting policies off-season. It’s a wide variety. A variety that reinforces the notion that stewardship really takes on custom approaches.
Authored by
Broc Romanek