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Private equity.
For lower-middle-market and middle-market sponsors under $10B, and the operating partners and heads of AI who work across their portfolio companies.
What we hear from sponsors.
These come up whether the fund has eight portfolio companies or twenty.
Two transformations at once
The firm needs AI in its own operations: portfolio reporting, the LP pack, the DDQ, deal screening. Every portfolio company needs it too, and both compete for the same people and budget.
Every portfolio company has an AI policy. Few track what it returns.
Adoption gets counted in licences, and pilots start without a CFO signed up to the result. Ask what AI saved last quarter, in hours or dollars, and nobody has the number.
Different industries, the same problems solved alone
A manufacturer, a services firm and a software company look nothing alike. Underneath, they are all working on invoices, contracts, forecasting and customer data, each picking its own tool, with nobody looking across the portfolio.
One head of AI, no bench
One person, or an operating partner, owns AI across fifteen or twenty companies, with influence but no authority. When a roadmap is ready, there are no data or AI engineers to build it.
The pace of change
Models, tools and vendor pitches change every quarter. Nobody inside has the time to sort what matters from the noise, so decisions stall or go to whoever pitched last.
The CIM says “AI-enabled” and nobody can check it in time
A diligence team has two to six weeks of exclusivity to decide whether the AI story is real, and whether AI threatens the margin being underwritten.
One workflow, live and measured by day 60.
Month one decides which. These are the three that come up most.
Every portfolio company scored on the AI Alpha Ladder and shown on one heatmap: what to fix once for all of them, and which company to start with.
Monthly packs and KPIs from every company in one record, month over month, every number traced to its page, ready before the value-creation review.
Today’s cost measured first, the workflow put live, and the result reported in a number the company’s CFO signs.
The 90-Day AI Program.
Month one maps the firm and the portfolio and picks the first workflow, at the fund or at one portfolio company. It is live by day 60 and measured against today by day 90.
The build runs with our bench of senior data and AI engineers, and the playbook is written so it can be repeated at the next company. I have built five data and AI functions from scratch inside funds, lenders and insurers.