The hidden prerequisite for success with AI in investment management

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Basis Points, our series where we tackle some of the biggest challenges in investment management one point at a time with Bipsync. I'm Chow Mai, marketing director here at Bipsync, and I'm joined by John Hands who oversees business development. Today, we're talking about a challenge nearly every allocator investment team faces. The overwhelming volume of research and the time it takes to find and connect the insights that matter most. From diligence notes and manager updates to investment committee decks and PDFs, Investment data lives everywhere. It lives in shared drives and email inboxes or spread across Slack or Teams messages. And while general purpose AI tools promise to help, most firms quickly realize that they don't deliver the precision, security, or ROI required for institutional investing. The promise is huge. AI could summarize years of diligence in seconds, draft ninety percent of investment committee memo instantly, or track portfolio exposure on demand. But here's the reality. Most general purpose AI tools don't deliver that kind of value. In fact, as Forbes highlighted earlier this year, ninety five percent of Gen AI pilots fail to deliver meaningful ROI. These tools don't understand your data, your workflows, or the unique structure of your firm. And without that historical context, AI only accelerates misalignment, not insight. Real ROI comes when AI is embedded into your firm's invest your firm's operating model, when it understands how your investment office actually works because it's built for this very purpose. So why do most firms struggle to harness AI's full potential? Because AI can only be as effective as the foundation it's built on. For AI to deliver meaningful results, data must be connected, contextualized, and secure. And that's where most general purpose AI tools fall short. For more than a decade, Bipsync has helped investment firms transform scattered, unstructured research into structured, connected, and actionable knowledge. Every note, document, and email added to the Bipsync environment strengthens your research foundation, linking managers, funds, strategies, and asset classes through a powerful one to many tagging system. Now we're taking that foundation to the next level with Bipsync AI, a suite of tools designed to help investment teams capture, organize, and uncover insights faster than ever before. The Bipsync AI suite includes research summarization, which condenses meeting notes, call records, and complex documents into clear takeaways, distilling extensive notes and attachments into digest digestible summaries. Also included is smart tagging, which eliminates manual tagging by recommending relevant labels for your notes and files, helping you organize research faster, uncover missed angles, and strengthen knowledge discoverability. And today, we're excited to introduce Toro, our AI research assistant, designed to answer natural language questions, handle tasks, and uncover insights across your entire body of research, putting your firm's institutional knowledge at your fingertips. Toro isn't a generic chat tool. It's a genuine research assistant that is built inside Bipsync, designed to understand the way that your firm works with your data, your workflows, and your controls. Together, Bipsync and Toro delivers a secure, relevant, and reliable insights built on three key principles. First, your data model matters. Toro understands the entities that you work with every day, managers, funds, asset classes, contacts, and research documents. As you capture and tag information in Bipsync, Turo uses that structure to understand the context of your research and deliver responses that are specific and meaningful to your firm. And importantly, Turo never trains on your data. Your information always stays within your environment, private, protected, and fully under your control. Second, your workflows matter. Every investment team operates differently. Bipsync was built to adapt to your existing processes, serving as a flexible investment workspace that fits how you already work. With Toro embedded in that environment, AI becomes a natural part of your daily workflow, helping you summarize notes, prep for investment committee meetings, or uncover trends across your research. And third, your controls matter. Security and confidentiality have always been at the core of what we do here at Bipsync. Toro operates within that same permission structure that governs how your research is stored and shared, keeping sensitive information protected and compliant at all times. In short, Toro delivers AI where it matters most, securely, contextually, and instantly. Let's see what it looks like in action. John, over to you. Thanks, Chao. Hi, everyone. I'm excited to show you what the team here at Bipsync has been working on over the past year. We've partnered very closely with our clients to build Toro, an AI powered research assistant that's built specifically for how investment teams work. Toro brings AI directly into the daily workflows investment professionals rely on. And because it runs inside Bipsync, everything you need is already there, Your notes, documents, data, and research context, all in one secure environment. There's no setup, no integrations, and no data leaving your system. Before we dive into a few examples, I wanna show you one powerful feature we carefully built that makes Toro very unique. Every investment firm has its own language, project code names, internal acronyms, or strategy terms that don't exist outside the walls of your team. That's why we built the Coral glossary. The glossary lets you define your firm's unique vocabulary, setting custom meetings, aliases, and descriptions for terms like project horizon or the blueprint initiative. Coro is aware of those definitions every time you ask a question, ensuring its answers reflect your firm's knowledge and terminology. This helps to eliminate ambiguity, improve accuracy, and ensure Coro delivers more relevant, precise responses without ever training on your data. And as your team grows, expanding into new asset classes, regions, or strategies, that glossary grows with you, maintaining consistency across your research. Here's a short video showcasing the dedicated secure interface where customers can create, edit, and manage glossary entries. Each entry includes a title, the term itself, any aliases, and a description field to capture the relevant context or meaning for each glossary entry for your firm. It's a simple feature with a powerful impact, giving Toro the context it needs to speak your firm's language. Now that we've covered how you can tailor Toro to your firm, let's see how it all comes together in practice. Alright. So what we have up on the screen here is the familiar Bipsync web application. What we've now done is put in the bottom right hand corner the new tool button for Coral. So by clicking this button, you'll get a new window of the research assistant. We have a few examples of what our clients can do to engineer a prompt, which are configurable for each client. But here, I am able to naturally start to have a conversation with Toro and explore our research database. So here, I am saying I am preparing for a meeting with Chicago River Partners, and I wanna discuss our investment in fund nine. I'm gonna ask Toro to summarize for me recent meeting notes and also share with me some insights about the performance of the underlying portfolio companies that Fund nine is invested in. Additionally, I'm gonna ask Toro if there's anything else I should be aware of that can help me pull through information throughout the notes and documents. So number one, Toro is going off, and you could see here through the search steps that Toro is canvassing the entire repository of content. One thing to note for Toro is that it does honor the permission structure and privacy that's built into Bipsync, something that is incredibly important from a compliance perspective. As you can see, within a few seconds, Toro is able to provide back not only high level of fund performance metrics, but also information across a wide range of topics, including what I had requested as it pertains to the underlying performance of the portfolio companies like Riverside Field Services and MedFlux Systems. Transparency is key across Bipsync in everything we do. So we built in these footnote features that allow the user to have direct access to the underlying content that Aura was referencing in its response. What we don't wanna do is have clients have to dig through a corpus of documentation to try and find out where that response came from. We will always cite information where relevant. Additionally, Oro is built specifically to canvas all of your documents. So what we've done is we've built a sophisticated multistep process that allows users to get past token limits of general AI tools and to build upon and continue upon their search through the large corpus of information. Many of our clients have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of documents and notes and emails stored within the Bipsync system, and Toro is built to ensure that we are finding the most relevant content across that corpus of information and giving each individual user access to further explore information as it pertains to a specific question. So as you can see here, I've been able to very quickly find out information, the source documentation, and really get excited and prepped up for the meeting that I'll have with Fund nine. Additionally, what we've built into this system is the ability for end users to edit the subject or title of their chats to the extent they wanna save them and also bookmark them for future use. An important feature for a lot of our clients is ensuring they can go back to historical chats, which we've built into the interface as well. So this is a great example for end users looking to have quick access to content in the system. In our second example, I wanna know what were the detractors for performance across a few of the funds that are in my portfolio. In particular, I wanna learn a bit about Chicago River Partners Fund nine as well as Luna Fund. Similar to our first example, Toro's gonna let you know how it's planning its approach, which steps it's taking. And within a few seconds, Toro's gonna let me know what were the main reasons that led to negative performance across the fund. So, specifically, here, I can see a couple portfolio companies and the reasons why they underperformed across both Chicago River Partners as well as LunaFund. So if I scroll up a little bit here, I can dig a a bit deeper into the specific issues that led to Mediflux systems, which appears to be a key detractor within within the portfolio. Customer churn, of course, I can always dig into the notes themselves, but I wanna actually follow-up and get a bit more granular into the reasons of what specifically led to the performance in Mediflux systems. Picking up on this conversation above, Toro is able to go deeper into additional information regarding the performance detractors for this specific portfolio company within Chicago River Partners. And as you can see, Toro is giving a lot more information and a lot more context in the particular query. So here, we can see that churn was one of the biggest reasons, followed by a couple of key management actions that took place over the course of this particular investment. Here, I'm just gonna quickly retitle this so I can find it quicker in the future and, of course, retrieve it back in my history if I ever need it. In our final example, we'll show how can provide information in a very digestible way. So here, I'm asking Coro to provide the performance of all the buyout funds that are within our portfolio, and I'd like to see that in a nice clean table. Additionally, I wanna know any commentary as to the performance of the fund. So why did it have the performance that it had? So once again, you can see Toro is planning its approach. And in a few short seconds here, I'll have a nice table providing fund by fund performance metrics, which I can then copy and paste out into any key materials I need to take on the go. So what you'll see here is I have my table, but furthermore, I am seeing some additional information Toro is able to provide me across distribution activity, performance attribution. And then, of course, the table, I'm able to scroll to the right and see UA's performance notes, the date, and then any additional commentary as it pertains to what drove that performance in a very quick short snippet. So once again, a super powerful quick use case for getting information from Toro. But those are just a few examples of how Toro can help unlock the value of your firm's collective intelligence, rounded in your data, your structure, and the way that your team works. Back to you, Chao. Thanks, John. So let's recap. Today, we looked at how investment teams can move beyond fragmented research to a connected, intelligent foundation with Bipsync and how Toro, our AI research assistant, builds on that foundation to surface insights instantly and securely. We explored how Toro understands your data, adapts to your workflows, protects your information, and even learns your firm's unique language through the Toro glossary, helping teams find answers faster and make more confident, informed decisions. In our next episode of the basis points, we'll dive into how Toro helps fund managers harness the full potential of AI across their research processes. If your team is spending too much time searching for information or recreating work you already have, Bipsync can help you turn research into a competitive advantage. Thanks for joining the Basis Points. Whether you're a an asset owner, consultant, or an industry partner, we're here to tackle investment challenges one point at a time. See you next time.