'Not for the Sake of AI': Greg Abel breaks with big tech

When Greg Abel took the podium at Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meeting in Omaha on Saturday, every analyst in the room was watching for the same thing: whether Warren Buffett's successor would use the AI boom to mark his own territory, or stay inside the lines his predecessor drew. 

Abel answered the question directly and his answer sounded unmistakably like Buffett.

Abel's statement wasn't just a technology policy. It was a signal about what kind of CEO he intends to be. Buffett built Berkshire on what he called his "circle of competence", a discipline of only investing in businesses he genuinely understood. 

The question hanging over the 2026 shareholder meeting was whether that framework would survive the moment Buffett himself stopped running the company.

Abel's public stance on AI suggests, at least for now, it will. He told shareholders that Berkshire's subsidiaries would use the technology only where it creates genuine value and is "additive to our businesses". That framing additive, not transformative is a deliberate contrast to the language coming out of Silicon Valley.

Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg have each publicly committed to spending that runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars in the AI infrastructure race. They frame it as existential fall behind on AI, and you lose the decade. Abel's framing is almost the opposite: use it where it works, ignore it where it doesn't.

CEOs of several Berkshire-owned companies including See's Candies, Dairy Queen, Brooks Running, and Jazwares, told reporters on Friday that their businesses are already embracing AI to varying degrees. The common thread: using it to save time and make workers more efficient rather than replacing core functions or making large capital bets.