The private equity investment team at Schroders Capital has a new artificial intelligence platform in place, designed to speed up the analysis of huge volumes of data and allow executives to spend more time on investing.
The Generative AI Investment Analyst platform, known as GAiiA, is an internal tool for Schroders’ $94 billion private markets business, a spokesperson said. It is a proprietary and internal-only platform that builds on the technical expertise of the firm’s data science specialists, combined with investment knowledge from the private equity team.
“This unique collaboration ensures that GAiiA is specifically tailored to Schroders Capital’s private equity investment process, providing a distinct advantage in generating valuable insights,” the spokesperson said in an email.
Powered by Open AI’s large language model, ChatGPT, and a custom retrieval augmented generation pipeline — an AI framework — the platform is now being used after “comprehensive in-house testing.” The platform “forms a core component of our leading private markets investment intellectual property,” a news release said.
Private equity executives can use the platform to automatically screen large volumes of data, accelerate due diligence processes, and generate a significant portion of draft investment summaries in less time. It also supports the creation of draft investment memos — a document that gives key information to the investment management team and committee regarding a potential investment opportunity in the private equity industry, such as financial performance, deal structure and exit strategy — and “has the potential to become a key part of the investment process,” the news release added.
Schroders said the new platform will enable the private equity investment team to analyze more investments, reallocate more time to adding value through direct interactions and strategic decisions on target and existing investments.
There’s also the potential for the platform to be applied beyond private equity.
“Schroders Capital has a clear vision for the future of AI,” the spokesperson said. The unit plans to “continually optimize GAiiA and to expand its use to private equity primaries and secondaries in the future, as well as to other private market asset classes within Schroders Capital where appropriate.”
Parent company Schroders has been actively using generative AI across the business for some time. For example, its internal AI assistant, Genie, has more than 1,200 active users around the world each day, the spokesperson added. The firm has also already identified and is working on “a substantial number of potential AI use cases across the business,” including to help to better understand client behavior and investment patterns.
“Schroders envisions a future where AI tools become an integral part of the investment process,” said Graham Taylor, head of private assets data insights at Schroders Capital, in the release. “The implementation of GAiiA is a significant step towards this vision. We are committed to driving innovation and embracing technology to deliver exceptional value to our clients across asset classes.”
Schroders Capital invests across private equity, real estate, secondaries, venture capital, private debt and other asset classes. Schroders had a total $956.9 billion in assets under management as of Dec. 31.
