The Agentic Allocator
Brad Calder, Managing Director, Head of Equities at TIFF Investment Management, joins The Agentic Allocator to walk through what two years of AI adoption looks like inside the OCIO. Brad leads TIFF’s public equity investments, including select arbitrage and crypto strategies, and plays a central role in manager selection and portfolio construction, and has spearheaded the firm's AI implementation. TIFF is an OCIO serving endowments, foundations, and other mission-driven organizations. In this episode, Brad walks through what AI adoption looks like on the ground: the use cases that are delivering tangible ROI, the ones that are still works in progress, the infrastructure decisions that turned out to matter, and the cultural conditions that made it all possible. Brad describes one of the most ambitious projects on TIFF's roadmap: a tool for the investment committee that connects every memo the firm has ever written to structured returns and exposure data, automatically surfacing the three most comparable historical investments whenever a new decision is being discussed. For a 35-year-old organization where no current IC member has been there since inception, this tool would give the IC access to the full weight of every decision TIFF has ever made. He also makes a sharp point about what AI adoption requires that most allocators underestimate: the willingness to keep re-experimenting, because the underlying models improve fast enough that something that failed six months ago may now be entirely viable. Think of it like high school chemistry, he says: if the experiment doesn't work, you alter it and try again. What You'll Learn: * How TIFF's decade of backing machine learning oriented hedge funds gave them a head start on understanding and trusting AI before the rest of the industry caught up * Why TIFF's legacy research management system became the catalyst for their AI build-out and what the 'SaaSpocalypse' means for allocators still locked into incumbent technology providers * How TIFF is using AI across unstructured data pitch books, quarterly letters, capital call notices * The collective intelligence tool TIFF is building for its investment committee: surfacing comparable historical investments, tied to returns data, going back to the firm's founding * Why the ROI of AI for allocators is not just efficiency and where Brad believes the real value will ultimately be felt * How TIFF combines offshore BPO with AI tools, and why the combination is complementary rather than substitutive * What an AI-enabled allocator looks like in five to ten years: instant probability estimates on prospective managers, AI-shaped due diligence agendas, and humans focused on the relationships and control rights that resist disintermediation * Why subscale endowments and foundations face a real risk of being left behind and why that is part of TIFF's mission to solve * The high school chemistry framework for AI experimentation: alter the experiment, keep trying, and never conclude something can't work based on a model that's already six months out of date About Brad Calder: Brad Calder is Managing Director, Head of Equities at TIFF Investment Management, where he leads TIFF’s public equity investments and has spearheaded its AI adoption and implementation. TIFF is an OCIO serving of endowments, foundations, and other mission-driven organizations. Brad has been at TIFF for 11 years. Before joining TIFF, he built expertise in systematic and machine learning-oriented investment strategies that has since informed the firm's approach to integrating AI across its investment and operational process. Episode Highlights: [02:12] How TIFF Got a Head Start on AI Brad traces TIFF's AI journey back a decade, to when the firm began backing machine learning oriented systematic hedge funds. That early exposure, learning how the technology worked from the inside, meant TIFF was ready to move fast when ChatGPT changed the landscape. The culture of continuous improvement that governs how TIFF evaluates external managers, Brad explains, is the same standard they've applied to their own organization. [04:39] The SaaSpocalypse and the Case for AI-Native Vendors TIFF's AI build-out was triggered, in part, by frustration with a legacy research management system that lacked the API capabilities needed to run LLM models over their database. Brad frames this as a broader market dynamic the 'SaaSpocalypse', in which allocators are waking up to the fact that incumbent SaaS providers that aren't investing in AI are creating white space for AI-native competitors to step in. [06:14] What AI Is Actually Doing for TIFF’s Investment Teams Brad walks through specific use cases: rapidly summarising incoming manager pitches against a structured template, comparing quarterly letters across managers over multiple periods to surface trends and outliers, and helping write investment memos. The shift from an analyst manually reading and cross-referencing multiple letters to an AI that can instantly identify what one manager is doing differently from the rest is, Brad argues, qualitatively different, not just faster. [07:39] Building TIFF’s Collective Intelligence Layer The most ambitious project on TIFF's roadmap is a tool for the investment committee that connects every memo the firm has ever written to structured returns and exposure data and automatically identifies the three most comparable historical investments. [11:09] Where the Real ROI Lives and Where It Doesn’t Brad is clear that AI adoption at TIFF is not primarily a headcount reduction exercise. The offshore BPO team in India has full access to TIFF's AI systems, and the combination is complementary. The true ROI, he argues, will be felt most in decision quality: the tools being built for the investment committee are designed specifically to help the team make better decisions and avoid the kind of mistakes that result in large losses. [14:08] The Challenge of Building Confidence in AI Output Brad is candid about the adoption friction inside TIFF: even when validation processes are in place, some team members still feel the instinct to double-check, follow up, or verify. Building the confidence to trust a validated AI output takes time and deliberate cultural work. His advice: keep re-experimenting, because the models are improving fast enough that a use case that failed six months ago may be entirely viable today. [15:56] The Five-to-Ten Year Vision: Humans Focused on What AI Cannot Do Brad's picture of the AI-enabled allocator is specific: systems that can take textual data and make forecasts from it, instant probability estimates on prospective managers drawn from decades of comparable data, and AI-shaped due diligence agendas that surface questions humans wouldn't have thought to ask. Where he believes humans remain essential for longer is in the relationship and control dimension: negotiating GP terms, engaging company management, exercising the kind of judgment that equity ownership demands. [20:08] The Scale Risk for Smaller Allocators Brad closes with a note of concern for subscale endowments and foundations that lack the budget to make these investments. AI, he argues, is not a rising tide that lifts all ships. It only lifts the ones that invest in making it work. That gap is precisely why TIFF exists: to help smaller mission-driven organisations access the sam...
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