Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is harnessing AI to parse customer feedback, take drive-thru orders, localize toys, and free workers from administrative tasks.
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Business Insider spoke to the CEOs of four Berkshire subsidiaries — Dairy Queen, Jazwares, Brooks Running, and See’s Candies — about their embrace of AI at Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting in Omaha last weekend.
“We don’t want to use AI just to say we’re using AI,” Dairy Queen CEO Troy Bader said, echoing Greg Abel, who succeeded Buffett as Berkshire’s CEO at the start of this year.
Abel said during a Q&A at the annual meeting that Berkshire was “not going to do AI for the sake of AI.” Instead, he championed a “narrow AI” strategy where humans still make decisions, there are safeguards in place, such as repeating prompts, and the focus is on generating value for Berkshire’s businesses.
AI is among the hottest topics in the business world as companies are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into developing the tech, laying off supposedly obsolete workers, and scrambling to find ways it can be used to gain an edge on the competition.
Bader said Dairy Queen recently used AI to analyze 100,000 pieces of fan feedback, and it was able to “quickly decipher” the common themes and trends.
He also noted the fast-food chain, known for its Blizzard desserts, recently expanded testing of AI-enhanced voice ordering in its drive-thrus to 50 more restaurants.
Bader said that if AI can take orders accurately, that frees up the person who was taking them previously to focus on other aspects of the customer experience, such as speed, quality, and hospitality.
“It’s not about displacing labor for us,” he said. “It’s about the most efficient utilization of labor.”
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David Neustein, the CEO of Jazwares, told Business Insider the Squishmallows maker has applied AI to everything from forecasting and production to supply-chain logistics and how it runs its warehouse facilities.
Neustein said the toymaker is constantly researching trends, and now it can deploy AI agents to analyze different demographics around the world and help the company decide which products to “develop and put on a shelf in a certain territory.”
“There’s a BNSF AI train, and I think everyone needs to get on this one,” he quipped, nodding to another Berkshire subsidiary, BNSF Railway.
Brooks CEO Dan Sheridan told Business Insider the sports-equipment company has seen a lot of progress with AI in its finance, marketing, and back-office divisions.
He said the “beauty is we’re taking all those resources and applying them to more demand creation, more salespeople, more activity in front of the house.”
See’s CEO Pat Egan said the confectioner, which Buffett has called his “dream business,” hasn’t yet found that AI “changes a lot directly” for its core business.
Still, Egan said he has “little doubt” that AI will play a more important role in the future, from driving efficiencies to boosting marketing.
“But we’re really at the front end of it,” he said.
