Black Sun Global accelerates FTSE 100 benchmarking with Normain’s Extractional AI

The most valuable thing AI can do is not to replace expertise, but to multiply it.  Black Sun Global has spent over 20  years developing a proprietary annual report benchmarking methodology that sets the standard for how listed companies understand their position relative to peers. Normain is now the engine that accelerates it.

Black Sun Global is one of the UK's leading stakeholder engagement consultancies, advising listed companies on how they report, communicate, and position themselves with stakeholders. A deep understanding of the competitive space is a crucial foundation: reading, extracting, and comparing data across hundreds of annual reports to help clients understand where they stand relative to peers.

The challenge is not just volume, but complexity. Annual reports distill 12 months of performance, programmes and strategy into a single volume running to hundreds of pages of data and narrative disclosures. Tracking themes, extracting comparable data points, and doing so consistently across a large universe of companies demands expertise, precision, and significant time. For years, this was a manual process.

“Normain is a force multiplier. It isn’t a productivity hack - it’s a controllable, rigorous, traceable AI tool that amplifies the value our reporting and communications experts can build for our clients. Normain allows us to multiply decades of human insight by the scale and speed of AI.”

Ian Roe, CEO, Black Sun Global

The competitive advantage Ian describes is built on an operational shift. Within days of onboarding, Black Sun's research analysts were working directly inside Normain, applying their proprietary methodology at a level of granular control, speed and verification the manual process simply could not support. The platform handles large PDF files without restriction, including annual reports filled with graphics, tables and charts, with no workflow compromises.

"A 35% reduction in research time per benchmark wasn't something we dared to hope for when we introduced Normain. We were wrong to doubt it! We can now extract, cross-reference, and verify data across hundreds of data points in the time it used to take to process a handful."

Nadya Kamenkovich, Black Sun Global

The "extract with sources" capability proved particularly valuable for this work, where traceability matters as much as the finding itself. For a consultancy whose reputation rests on the integrity of its analysis, being able to show precisely where every data point originates is not a nice-to-have. It is table stakes.

Multiple analysts across the Black Sun team now use Normain daily. What began as a single use case is becoming a core part of how the team delivers its research, at a quality and scale that was not previously possible.

This is what Normain was built for: not to replace expert judgement, but to give it more reach.

Running FTSE 100-scale benchmarking manually? Book a demo to see what your team could do with Normain.