A new era of robots reading financial statements and machines monitoring earnings calls means analysts no longer need to sweat a company's every last word. Company executives have started to adapt their statements and even their delivery to cater to the algorithms parsing text and speech for trading signals, researchers at Georgia State University and Columbia University have found. Managers are emphasizing positivity and avoiding words or phrases known to be perceived by machines as negative. So it's out with things like "claimants" and "cease" and in with the likes of "innovator" and "improving." "Increasing AI readership motivates firms to prepare filings that are more friendly to machine parsing and processing," a team of academics argues in a new paper.