At Benefit Street Partners, a credit-focused investment manager, answering an investment committee’s follow-up questions used to take days or weeks. Portfolio manager Anant Kumar says analysts can now turn a round of comments in a day with Codex, and often answer questions during the meeting itself. BSP is using the tools to add more review capacity and rigor to underwriting within the same timeframe, rather than to do more deals.

Kumar now acts as his own developer. To create a dashboard he could share with colleagues, he previously needed someone with software expertise to build a website and pull in the data; now he uses AI to draft code and review it for errors. His tracker uses public SEC filings from business development companies (BDCs) to compare how firms value the same loan, letting the team see how its marks compare with other holders’ valuations. The first version took a day, with Codex used for code review; after adding features and refining the interface over subsequent weeks, Kumar estimates total development time at 10–12 hours.

Kumar’s other tool analyzes credit agreements, which are often 300 pages or longer, to find clauses that could shift value away from lenders. Previously, that meant asking outside counsel to work through the agreement page by page. Kumar brought together memos from leading law firms on clauses and risks to watch for, and describes the analyzer as a “second brain within our organization.” An uploaded credit agreement takes about 20 minutes to process into a first-pass analysis, followed by an hour or more of human review. BSP has refactored the tool with GPT-6 Astra, and it is now live in the company-hosted portal.

Kumar stresses that AI is helpful for collating data, ingesting it, and synthesizing analysis, but the ultimate investment decision needs to be made by a human. Underwriting remains a multi-round process: each round consists of further diligence and a revised memo responding to the investment committee’s questions, with deal timelines ranging from a few days to a few weeks. With more information at their disposal, he says the team feels more confident in decision making. BSP is also working to connect information across deals, and sees continuous underwriting as a longer-term aspiration: monitoring loans as news happens and examining effects across the portfolio, rather than re-underwriting only after an event.

Kumar says Codex has unlocked his day, leaving more hours for high-level work and less routine work.