Introduction

Extrnal corporate reporting is in the middle of its largest transformation since the move from print to PDF in the 1990s. The change is not cosmetic. It is structural and driven simultaneously by three forces that, until recently, were treated as separate developments: regulation, sustainability, and artificial intelligence.

On the regulatory side, more than three thousand European issuers now file their annual financial reports in the inline XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) format prescribed by the European Single Electronic Format (ESEF), with national enforcers running thousands of compliance examinations each year. ¹

On the sustainability side, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) have begun to embed non-financial disclosure into the same legal and technical infrastructure as the financial statements. ²

And on the technology side, large language models such as ChatGPT have quietly become one of the most influential readers of corporate disclosure,silently consuming filings, summarising results, and shaping the impressions investors, journalists and employees form of a company before they ever open the document themselves. ³

Taken individually, these developments may appear incremental. Taken together, however, they point to a more fundamental transformation: the annual report is evolving from a static document into a structured source of corporate information, designed to serve both human and machine users. This shift changes not only how annual reports are consumed, but also how they need to be produced.