September 15, 2025
Opportunity Scoring V2, Featuring Expert Call Analysis
James O'Dwyer
Expert Calls Guide Every Deal Decision, Yet Remain Underutilized
Your team conducts 60 to 100 expert calls per deal. That’s 150+ hours of your team’s time.
Expert calls offer unique insights that can shape your thesis, target prioritization, key screening criteria, value creation opportunities and risks, and add weight to confirmatory diligence. But, leveraging expert calls at scale is time consuming, while capturing nuance across calls and connecting the insights with other data sources can get lost or missed. That's a big missed opportunity.
Instead of treating expert calls as isolated data points, Metal creates a systematic intelligence layer that actively contributes insights from expert calls to opportunity scoring and investment decision-making, enabling funds to leverage expert calls at scale at each stage of your investment lifecycle.
PE AI Solutions: Four Expert Call Analysis Capabilities
Here's how Metal utilizes its unique data infrastructure, as an AI platform, to transform how PE teams interact with daily expert calls:
1) Instant Expert Intelligence Access: Every expert call is automatically organized within target company libraries. No more hunting through folders when IC prep demands specific insights.
Instead, they’re directly linked to each target and easily searchable and queryable. Now, you can have expert insights on each target at your fingertips with:
- Faster access to the details that matter
- Stronger thesis development
- More effective pressure-testing of findings
- Clearer visibility into potential discrepancies
Target Opportunity Use Case
2) Know What You Don't Know: A structured approach to expert insights helps investors quickly identify the themes that matter most—whether it’s revenue drivers, pricing dynamics, key purchase criteria, cyclicality, or risks of commoditization. By breaking down perspectives on each of these areas, you can frame a clear thesis and build a balanced view of both the opportunities and the risks.
Equally important, this process highlights potential gaps in the information available. Spotting those gaps early allows you to prioritize data collection and focus diligence efforts where they will deliver the most impact.
Topics Detection Feature
3) Sentiment Analysis Over Time: By systematically tracking expert sentiment across critical business areas, investors can uncover emerging trends that a manual review might overlook. Sentiment analysis over time reveals patterns that highlight where momentum is building—and where it may be fading.
Comparing sentiment across sub-sectors can surface opportunities within industries that are quietly gaining strength. Similarly, analyzing sentiment across individual targets helps identify which companies are better positioned to succeed—and, more importantly, the underlying reasons why.
Sentiment Analysis Feature
4) Cross-Call Mentions: Automatically surface mentions of companies and key stakeholders to build a sharper view of the market. These insights can inform potential target lists, outline the competitive landscape, highlight customer bases, and even identify acquisition or add-on opportunities.
Entity Mentions Feature
Optimize Expert Calls Across The Diligence Lifecycle
Metal’s Expert Call Analysis feature transforms expert intelligence from a manual research task into a systematic scoring advantage. When sentiment analysis reveals consistent expert optimism about a target's technology differentiation, or topic detection indicates key factors, opportunities or risks, PE deal teams can move from information gathering to investment decision with greater speed, clarity and confidence.
Combined with CIM Scoring, Expert Call Analysis transforms how PE teams evaluate opportunities from instinct-based decisions to data-backed conviction.
Identifying fact patterns is critical. By combining CIM Scoring and Expert Call Analysis, deal teams can better inform their key screening criteria, potential flags, priority areas for diligence, gaps in information and build a fact-base to inform their opportunity scores.
Get Started with Metal’s Expert Call Analysis
Book a demo to discover how Expert Call Analysis could work with your deal flow.