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$2.2B attributed to a governed AI portfolio
$8B+ alternative asset manager · de facto Chief AI Officer, reporting to the CEO
Investor profits attributable to production AI platforms
IRR on the AI initiative portfolio
People in the global data & AI organization
- 01Use-case portfolioscored, costed
- 02Business caseskill criteria set
- 03Fund / defundon measured results
- 04Board reportingreturns attributed
AI run like any other capital allocation: cases, criteria, attribution
The situation
Individual systems are the easy part. The harder part is running AI as a capital-allocation problem: a portfolio of initiatives, each with a business case, a cost band, and a kill criterion, reported to a CEO and board in the language they use for every other investment. Most firms never get here — AI stays a technology line item and is never held to a return.
What we built
- 01A scored AI portfolio with explicit business cases, funded and defunded on measured performance
- 02A 160-person global organization — hiring, team design, and the vendor bench
- 03Build-vs-buy discipline: vendors for commodity problems, internal build where the data was the moat
- 04Board-grade attribution — returns tied to specific systems, which is why funding survived budget cycles
This is the job description of the retainer. A firm that can’t justify a full-time chief AI officer can still have the portfolio discipline, the governance standard, and the board-grade reporting — which is where most of the value in the role was in the first place.