• Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting is next week, but Warren Buffett won't be hosting.
• New CEO Greg Abel will welcome tens of thousands of shareholders from across the world to Omaha.
• Berkshire gurus want Abel to share his plans for stocks, businesses, cash, and leadership.

What is Berkshire Hathaway without Warren Buffett in charge?

Tens of thousands of shareholders are hoping to find out when they descend on the legendary investor's hometown of Omaha next week.

They're making the pilgrimage to attend Berkshire's annual meeting, dubbed "Woodstock for Capitalists" because it attracts a huge crowd of like-minded investors for a weekend of learning, networking, and celebration.

But for the first time, Buffett won't be hosting the gathering. Instead, it will be Greg Abel, who took over as Berkshire's CEO at the start of this year, marking the end of the business icon's six-decade run.

Business Insider asked five Berkshire gurus what they'd like to hear from Abel next week. They shared questions about his management approach, plans for Berkshire's cash pile and stock portfolio, and even his personal life.

1. Trailing the index

Berkshire stock has declined 14% since Buffett's surprise retirement announcement on May 3 last year, while the S&P 500 has gained 26%.

David Kass, a finance professor at the University of Maryland and a longtime Berkshire blogger, said he would like to hear Abel's "explanation for Berkshire underperforming the S&P 500" by roughly 40 percentage points in under 12 months.

2. Money mountain

Berkshire held a record $373 billion of cash, Treasury bills, and other liquid assets at the end of December. That figure exceeds the market value of Chevron ($371 billion), Palantir ($365 billion), and Cisco ($355 billion).

Buffett, perhaps the world's foremost bargain hunter, struggled in recent years to deploy Berkshire's cash as stock valuations surged, acquisition prices soared, and even buybacks grew unattractive as Berkshire shares climbed.

Now Buffett has stepped aside, it's up to Abel to put that money to work.

"What are his plans to invest $373 billion in cash?" Kass asked.

Brett Gardner, an analyst and the author of "Buffett's Early Investments," raised the prospect that Berkshire might use its dry powder to purchase Buffett's roughly 14% stake in the business, a position worth $138 billion.

"Does Berkshire plan on buying Warren's stake in a negotiated transaction someday?" he asked.

3. Leadership revamp

Abel has made a few changes to Berkshire's top brass since taking over, most notably appointing NetJets CEO Adam Johnson as president.

Johnson and Katie Farmer, the CEO of Berkshire-owned BNSF Railway, will join Abel onstage for the second Q&A session.

Larry Cunningham, the author of several books about Berkshire and the director of the University of Delaware's Weinberg Center, told Business Insider he's looking forward to seeing Abel engage with the two subsidiary CEOs, "a new practice that I hope will add tremendous value to the meeting."

Gardner is also looking for indications of whether Abel intends to appoint other divisional leaders like Johnson. Under Buffett, subsidiary CEOs reported to Abel as the head of the non-insurance businesses, and Berkshire's insurance chief, Ajit Jain.

Chris Ballard, a managing director at Check Capital Management, said he was curious about Ted Weschler's expanded role at Berkshire. Abel touched on that in his first shareholder letter, following the departure of the other investment manager, Todd Combs.

Ballard said he was hoping Abel would share "some details on how often he sees Ted, how often he is in contact with Ted, and what sort of behind-the-scenes responsibilities Greg leans on Ted for."

4. Stocks and subsidiaries

In his first shareholder letter, Abel listed Berkshire's core stock holdings as Apple, American Express, Coca-Cola, and Moody's, leaving out two large positions — Bank of America and Chevron.

Ballard said he was "very interested" to hear Abel's thoughts on Berkshire's stocks and what kinds of businesses he'd consider adding to its core portfolio.

He also highlighted that almost nothing is known about Abel's investing experience.

"We don't know what Greg's past personal or professional investment performance looks like, and we are very interested in him describing some investment successes and failures, so we can get a sense for what we might expect going forward," Ballard said.

Paul Lountzis, a longtime Berkshire shareholder and the president of Lountzis Asset Management, said he was curious whether Abel would look to offload any subsidiaries. Buffett famously offered businesses a permanent home, which distinguished Berkshire from other buyers.

"Does he see Berkshire selling any businesses if they receive offers to buy some of the companies at attractive prices?" Lountzis asked.

5. Hands-on vs. hands-off

Buffett and his late business partner, Charlie Munger, structured Berkshire as a decentralized web of autonomous subsidiaries, which allowed them to focus on allocating capital inside and outside the company instead of running the businesses themselves.

Abel is a more hands-on manager and may demand more of Berkshire's businesses. He wrote in his letter that Pilot had ranked second in a study of travel centers' popularity, and he wouldn't be pleased until it takes the No. 1 spot.

He also noted that Berkshire first invested in Pilot in 2017 but was "contractually delayed" from managing it until 2023, and said, "that mistake will not happen again."

"His comments were uncompromising and could be taken as unwelcoming," Ballard said. "In the past, Buffett wanted Berkshire to be seen as a great home for a long-held family business, and he would remain hands off and allow the current owners to have autonomy. Abel's comments could deter such owners from approaching Berkshire in the future."

Ballard asked whether Abel would promise a permanent home to potential sellers, and whether he would allow the same level of autonomy as Buffett and Munger did or seek to optimize businesses after buying them.

6. Getting personal

Buffett is famous for his investing prowess, his philanthropy, his frugal lifestyle, his junk-food diet, and more. Very little is known about Abel by comparison.

"What does his typical day look like?" Kass asked. "What percentage of his time is spent on travel to Berkshire's companies? How many hours per day does he spend on investment research, such as reading 10-Ks?"

Ballard said he's eager to learn "more about Greg as a person, both personally and professionally." He suggested Abel could talk about his love of ice hockey, his formative life experiences, his philanthropy, and his friends in the business world.

"It'd be nice to hear stories about some interactions that have taken place with other professionals, who he admires — other than Buffett — and what inspires him," Ballard added. "What books does he like? What movies, etc.?"

7. Next generation

Berkshire has already seen its biggest shake-up in decades, and there could be more changes to come.

Gardner said he'd like to know who will succeed Jain, who turns 75 this summer, as insurance chief. Lountzis inquired about how Abel is working with his lieutenants to line up successors for when Jain and other executives step down.

Buffett has headlined Berkshire's big bash for decades. Shareholders are about to find out what it's like when he's not running the show.

• BNY's CEO, Robin Vince, is all in on AI's role in steering the bank's future.
• Now, some managers oversee the bank's 140 digital employees, a form of agentic AI.
• We spoke to Vince and a BNY managing director about the program.

Despite its 240-year pedigree, BNY isn't showing its age.

Under CEO Robin Vince, who took the reins in 2022, the firm — founded by Alexander Hamilton — is aggressively embracing AI. Recently, it has begun entrusting some managers with oversight of a contingent of new workers who don't even require a chair: the digital employee.

"All digital employees report to a human manager," Vince said in an interview with Business Insider this month in Palm Beach.

These digital employees create a layered effect with the company's agentic products, in which a single entity coordinates the activities of multiple individual agents. The digital workforce is more than 140 agents strong, each one with roughly two dozen skills, give or take, comprising their suite of abilities.

And, just like humans, they're held accountable for their work — with performance reviews.

After executing a variety of tasks humans might find tedious, the digital employee presents it to "the human who's responsible for the process — 'I've just done three quarters of the work for you. And by the way, I did it in 10 minutes instead of what would have otherwise been two weeks," the CEO explained.

About 100 managers across the firm oversee digital employees, including Rachel Lewis, a managing director and a two-decade BNY veteran who now serves as head of AI enablement for operations. Appointed to the role this year, Lewis is now helping teams across the bank build and deploy digital employees within their day-to-day workflows.

"We're kind of transferring the mundane to the machines," she said, describing how the tools are taking over routine processes and shifting how work gets done.

Lewis told Business Insider she works closely with teams across BNY to help them develop their own digital employees — often starting with ideas that come directly from the people doing the work and turning them into tools over time.

"The person that came up with that idea actually gets the opportunity to build that digital employee," she said. As teams begin to incorporate them into their workflows, she added, the technology starts to feel less like software and more like part of the team. "It's just almost having a virtual teammate as part of your group."

170,000 hours of training

To prepare for the AI age, BNY implemented a massive 170,000-hour AI training program for its 48,000 staffers. "Everyone in the company has done two to three hours," he said. The goal was to turn employees into a new class of supervisors who managed, rather than competed with, the machine. "We're investing in our people, because I want them to be the unlockers and users of AI," Vince added.

Last week, he sent a memo to several thousand of the firm's senior leaders pointing to some of the firm's past efforts in AI and encouraging them to be proactive in continuing to incorporate it. "We have an obligation to our company to capture this opportunity," Vince wrote in the email, whose subject line was "Reimagining BNY."

"This is a fundamental leadership shift, not simply a capability shift," he added. "It will require each of us to lean in and role-model how to engage with AI and how to harness it to solve problems."

Speaking to Business Insider, Vince described his first personal deep dive into AI as a "summer project" that kicked off in 2023 and never ended.

It was sparked by a YouTube video he saw that broke down the functionality of Tesla's Autopilot 12. He watched as the car observed human behavior and applied what it saw to navigating a stop sign, rather than adhering to a few rigid lines of code. "It was very clear to me that the future of AI was going to be learning to make decisions," Vince said. He wanted to bring that same adaptive intelligence to the bank. "It was highly applicable to our businesses," he added, "and it would be able to be a very fundamental input to how we actually ran the company."

Expanding the digital workforce

While some of the earliest digital employees have applications focused on straightforward fixes like data repair and data capture, Lewis said the tools that have stood out most are those that make it easier for employees to build and refine their own digital employees.

Building a digital employee starts with observing how work is actually done. Teams record themselves completing tasks step by step, allowing the system to analyze different approaches and identify the most efficient way to perform the work. That output is then used to generate the instructions that guide a digital employee, which are refined over time as teams train the system on new variations of the task.

Lewis said that as digital employees become embedded in workflows, teams are also treating them more like members of the workforce. "There is a performance review," she said.

Managers evaluate how the systems perform by reviewing outputs, identifying where they skip tasks or "didn't perform as expected," and feeding that work back into the system to be retrained on new variations and edge cases.

"We're continuously monitoring them," she added. "Every week it gets a little bit better."

Even as it expands its digital workforce, Vince said there are no plans to cut back on human capital; these tools, he said, are meant to supercharge their workflow, but not take responsibilities out of their hands. "I speak to CEOs who say, 'We're going to downsize, massively, our campus program.'" Vince's reply? "Why would you do that?"

"We've got the opportunity to have young people who are pre-trained in AI, enthusiastic, and be able to add to our business in different ways," he said.