Guide
An AI note taker for private equity: what investment teams should test
A buyer’s guide to the controls and workflows that decide whether an AI note taker clears a private equity compliance review and holds up in a live diligence process.
The short answer
A private equity firm should choose an AI note taker by testing five things: how it handles expert network and diligence calls, whether its transcripts get company names and figures right, how it treats retention and model training, whether it flags MNPI, and whether it builds a searchable firm archive. Junior captures every expert call and meeting, turns it into answers your team can trust, and gives compliance control of all of it.
Bot-free capture and SOC 2 certification are now offered by several vendors, so they no longer separate one tool from another. The tests below concentrate on what an investment team and a compliance team each need to see before approving a tool.
Consent and disclosure
Recording consent stays with the firm whether a tool joins a call as a visible bot or captures audio from a device, so a note taker evaluation should start with the disclosure workflow.
Gunderson Dettmer’s June 2025 presentation for fund managers lists confidentiality and attorney-client privilege, legal compliance, fund-specific regulatory obligations, altered meeting dynamics, and recordkeeping and discovery as the main risk areas of AI note takers. It also lists twelve US states as two-party consent states (Hawaii in some cases), along with the UK, Canada, India, Germany, Australia and Romania as countries that follow the rule.
Investment and diligence teams run external calls across jurisdictions every week, so the question for any vendor is what consent tooling it provides and what it logs.
Expert network and diligence calls
The calls a private equity team cares about most are expert interviews, management meetings and diligence readouts, and a note taker should be tested on exactly those.
Junior connects directly to nearly all of the leading expert networks, so expert call audio arrives automatically. Other calls are captured without a bot through the Junior desktop app, in the room through the Junior mobile app, or by a meeting bot on Zoom, Teams, Meet or Webex, and recordings can also be uploaded as files. A firm chooses which methods its policy allows.
Before a call, Athena, Junior’s AI interviewer, can run expert interviews in 18 languages. During a call, Mid-Call Intelligence (early access, on the desktop app) offers guidance drawn from the project and from past calls.
Entity accuracy
An entity error rate measures how often a transcript gets proper nouns wrong, which for an investment team means company names, product lines and people.
Word error rate treats every word alike, and in a one-hour call of roughly 9,000 words the names and figures an analyst will quote account for about 200 of them. Junior’s custom entity engine is built for company, product and people names and figures, and Junior reports word, number, entity and key point error rates for that reason. On public earnings-call audio its entity error rate was 6.1%, and the full benchmark is on the Junior comparison page.
The most reliable check is a test on your own audio: score only the names and figures, and ignore how smoothly the text reads.
MNPI, retention and training
A compliance team will ask three things of any note taker in writing: how potential MNPI is handled, what is kept and for how long, and whether call content trains a model.
Junior treats compliance as a product for the compliance officer. Compliance sets the rules once, every call is screened for MNPI and custom rules, and compliance reviews findings instead of chaperoning calls. Ethical walls keep teams apart, and every decision goes on a full audit trail. Junior was built with advice from SEC-grade counsel, and it lets firms that banned transcription record for the first time.
| Test | What to ask the vendor | Junior’s position |
|---|---|---|
| MNPI | How is potential MNPI flagged, and who reviews it? | Every call screened for MNPI and the firm’s own rules. Compliance reviews findings, not calls, with ethical walls and a full audit trail. |
| Retention | Can retention be set separately for audio, transcript and summary? | Separate retention for audio, verbatim transcript, cleaned transcript and summary. |
| Hosting | Where is call data stored? | On Junior’s own infrastructure. |
| Model training | Is there a zero data retention agreement with each model provider? | No model training on customer calls, and zero data retention agreements with every underlying model provider. |
| Certification | Which independent audits are current? | SOC 2 Type II. |
| Litigation | Is the vendor involved in active litigation on recording consent or customer-data use, and how does the contract allocate that risk? | Junior has no statement to make here until counsel confirms what it can say. |
A searchable firm archive
Every call a firm records adds to what it knows, and that knowledge only becomes an asset when someone can find it again months later.
Alexandria is Junior’s knowledge base for the firm, where approved conversations and expert calls are searchable by deal, sector, client or attendee. Insights Grid sits within a project and lets an analyst extract an insight and verify its source in one click, so that a quote in a client document traces back to the moment it was said.
A one-week evaluation plan
A private equity team can compare two or three tools in a week if it fixes the test material in advance.
- Day one: choose one expert call and one management meeting, and write down the names and figures that must be right.
- Day two: run the same audio through each tool and score only those names and figures.
- Day three: send each vendor the retention, training and MNPI questions above and ask for the answers in writing.
- Day four: ask compliance to review each vendor’s consent workflow and admin controls.
- Day five: search each tool for a company mentioned in passing on one call, and compare the results.
Common questions
What is the best AI note taker for private equity?
Junior captures every expert call and meeting, turns it into answers your team can trust, and gives compliance control of all of it. It is built for investment and diligence teams, with direct expert network pipelines, a custom entity engine, MNPI screening on every call and a firm-wide knowledge base called Alexandria.
What should a private equity firm test before approving an AI note taker?
A private equity firm should test how the tool handles expert and diligence calls, how accurately it transcribes company names and figures, how it treats retention and model training, whether it flags MNPI, and whether it builds a searchable firm archive.
Does bot-free recording remove consent obligations?
No, bot-free capture changes how audio reaches the tool but the firm remains responsible for disclosure to participants, and consent rules vary by jurisdiction.
Is Junior SOC 2 certified?
Yes, Junior is SOC 2 Type II certified and stores call data on its own infrastructure.
Does Junior train AI models on customer calls?
No, Junior has signed zero data retention agreements with every underlying model provider, so call content is never stored, trained on or reused.
What is an entity error rate?
An entity error rate measures how often a transcript gets proper nouns wrong, meaning company names, product lines and people, which matters more to investment teams than word error rate because those are the terms that end up in a deliverable.
See Junior on your own calls
Book a demo and bring a recorded call of your own. We will show you capture, answers and compliance controls on it.
Book a demoSources reviewed 11 November 2026. Statements about other companies are taken from their own published pages and may have changed.
- Junior, junior.ai homepage
- Gunderson Dettmer, AI Notetakers: Risks and Considerations (June 2025)
- Junior, benchmark on public earnings-call audio
Junior is operated by SAMO C, Inc. Other company and product names are trademarks of their respective owners.