How Berkshire Partners’ Collaborative Approach Led to AI Adoption

With nearly 40 years of experience and over $28 billion in assets under management, Berkshire’s team of more than 200 investment professionals invests with a unified philosophy: relationships matter, a belief in the power of teams, and winning the right way.

Berkshire’s partnership-driven approach is backed up by a long investment history. From household names like CrossFit, to their recent exit with SRS Distribution, Berkshire’s long-term view has allowed them to remain steadfast in the face of volatility.

Ambitious Goals for AI

When generative AI burst onto the scene in 2023, Berkshire Partners immediately understood its potential to fundamentally change their investment process. Their leadership team set four impactful objectives:

1. Accelerate research: How could they improve their ability to develop an investment thesis and reach conviction faster?
2. Increase efficiency: How could they enhance the efficiency of their investment team, increasing the depth and breadth of their coverage?
3. Improve access to knowledge: How could they democratize 40 years of fund data, surfacing insights for the entire firm, while working within a data governance framework?
4. Drive Adoption: How could they successfully implement change management to facilitate AI adoption, helping their teams enhance and accelerate their work?

In addition to these goals, Berkshire recognized the need for a technology partner who could not only handle the technical implementation but also provide essential support in change management to ensure firm-wide adoption.

Berkshire Partners, meet Metal

Berkshire initially experimented with AI tooling in-house, but soon recognized the complexity and resource intensity it required. This led them to seek out a partner focused on their specific needs—enter Metal.

Our philosophy at Metal was simple: (1) Maintain 100% focus on high impact fund workflows, and (2) build a tool that "just works" by automatically capturing and operationalizing critical fund data, removing the need for complex configurations.

Critically, we shared Berkshire’s belief in the importance of partnerships. We knew that implementing AI would require more than just deploying technology; it would require driving adoption to help every employee leverage AI in their workflow.

Accelerating Research

To reach conviction on a space, Berkshire’s team previously had to manually process vast amounts of unstructured data: research call notes and transcripts, company financials, public filings, and more.

For example, expert call transcripts offer valuable context—providing the story behind the metrics—but are inherently unstructured, making them time-consuming to analyze.

With Metal, Berkshire’s team can upload thousands of transcript pages and summarize large document sets or drill down into details. Our specialized data processing allows Berkshire to differentiate between speakers, identify mentions of specific companies, and focus on key financial metrics and KPIs—automating tasks that previously consumed hours of analyst time.

Expert Call Report

To encourage utilization, Berkshire regularly reviewed Metal’s outputs and accuracy with our team. It was crucial for us to demonstrate early wins for their staff, while empowering them to shape the product through their feedback. This ongoing collaboration has been key to our shared success.

Efficiency Gains and Data Integrations

Metal is also designed to easily integrate with critical business systems. For Berkshire Partners, this meant tying in their CRM data to provide a holistic picture of every opportunity or portfolio company.

We worked closely with Berkshire to understand how their CRM was organized and what data needed to be pulled into Metal. This was not only key from an integration perspective, but gave Berkshire complete control over what data gets stored into Metal to ensure they’re adhering to compliance requirements.

By augmenting Metal with Berkshire’s CRM data, their team was given unprecedented views of companies through data aggregation. For example, in addition to company-provided documents and public research, we also pulled in key data such as company descriptions, demographic data, financials, and activity notes from key meetings.

Company Page

With this data stored in Metal, it became far more discoverable. For example, Berkshire’s teams can now surface companies through simple natural language searches.

Company Search

Additionally, Metal offers a holistic view of qualitative and quantitative data for each company in the system. This allows Berkshire’s teams to gain insights on anything from financial performance relative to the market, to preparing for management meetings in a fraction of the time.

Company Chat

With the introduction of rich company dashboards and the aggregation of fund history in Metal, the next phase of our partnership focused on empowering Berkshire’s team with access to these new insights.

Firm-wide Access to Novel Insights

Berkshire’s team can now surface insights across their entire history of deals and portfolio companies, democratizing knowledge and making it accessible to everyone in the firm, all within the firm’s data governance framework and requirements.

For example, by storing company descriptions, notes, and metrics, Metal can suggest similar companies based on a company’s profile. And given Berkshire’s control over what data gets stored in Metal, they can adhere to compliance requirements and protect non-public information.

Similar Companies in Metal

By proactively surfacing these connections, Berkshire’s teams are presented with correlations that they otherwise may have missed.

The First Mover Advantage

By embracing AI early, Berkshire Partners is in the enviable position of deploying advanced AI workflows across their entire firm. Our collaborative approach has been critical, allowing us to demonstrate early wins that were made visible to the team, helping foster adoption.

The results speak for themselves. Their teams have identified workflow efficiencies, enabling their investment staff to concentrate more on high-value activities and expand coverage without adding to their workload. Further, the ability to draw insights from decades of investment history has proven invaluable. It's not just about having access to this data—it’s about leveraging it effectively and appropriately to inform decision-making.

With Metal, we’ve fast-tracked our path to leverage meaningful AI benefits across the firm – from our investment staff to our support staff and everyone in between. Metal’s partnership-driven approach has been key—not only in implementing the technology but in ensuring its adoption across our firm.

-Eric Souza, CTO

But the work does not stop here! As we continue to push Metal’s capabilities and tackle high impact fund workflows, we’re grateful to work with the immensely talented team at Berkshire Partners and look forward to our continued collaboration.

If your fund is in the process of integrating AI into your operations, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us today and take the first step toward transforming your investment process with Metal.