Private equity portfolios
Value creation plans increasingly assume AI will deliver a step change in margin. The portfolio company usually has neither the baseline nor the requirements work to make that true.
Where we get brought in.
Testing the AI assumption in a value creation plan
Whether the margin improvement is available, where it actually sits, and what has to be true for it to land inside the hold period.
Operating model design after acquisition
Including the honest version of what a business can absorb, which is usually less than the plan assumes and more than the management team fears.
Carve-outs and transitional arrangements
Establishing early which systems and processes genuinely cannot be changed without a third party's agreement, so the plan is built around real constraints.
Defensibility
What this business knows that a competitor with public data and off-the-shelf AI cannot replicate. It is the layer most often assumed and least often documented, and it is what a buyer pays for.
Working at both ends
We work with the sponsor and with the management team, which are different conversations.
The sponsor needs to know whether the plan is credible. The management team needs a route they can actually run while continuing to trade.
Our GenAI Strategy Playbook is the structure we use for both, because it forces the same five questions in the same order regardless of who is in the room.
CASE STUDYNEEDS A CASE STUDY.
Risk
tbd
Decision
tbd
“
tbd
person title
Outcome
z
y
steps
client servicing cut from 37 steps
a+
x
steps
onboarding cut
from 164 steps
hours saved per client
new clients
per year
“
Payments businesses know their cost per transaction to four decimal places. But ask what an exception costs and the room goes quiet. It’s rare that nobody has looked. Rather, the number sits across three teams and a shared inbox. When we do pin down the figure, the business case usually stops needing to be argued.
Moritz Dinger, Strategy Director
