AI for Private Equity That Moves EBITDA, Not Slides

We start with one company, not twenty. The anchor portco gets a readiness assessment, an executive working session, and a 90-day rollout — and every prompt, workflow, and decision gets documented into a playbook the firm owns. The second company starts from that playbook instead of from zero, so each rollout gets faster and cheaper than the last. Operating partners get a comparable readiness picture across companies instead of twenty different vendors telling twenty different stories.

Yes. Pre-close, we give you a plain-English read on a target: where AI can actually move the P&L in the first year, what the data and tooling reality is, and what the first 100 days should look like. It is written for an investment committee, not for a technical audience. Post-close, the same document becomes the execution plan instead of shelfware.

Both, in sequence. The introduction usually comes from an operating partner or a board member who wants the portfolio moving. The engagement itself is owned by the portfolio company — typically the COO or CFO, because the mandate is almost always efficiency with a number attached. We work with whoever owns that number.

Scoped on the call, in writing, before any work starts. We price the program, not the head count — and portfolio work compounds in your favor, because the playbook built at the first company carries to the next one. If you want a number your IC can react to, book the scoping call and you will have a written proposal within two business days.

Everything runs in your accounts and your portfolio company’s accounts — their AI subscriptions, their data, their access controls. Nothing routes through ours. Every engagement includes a written AI use policy and guardrails, so the rollout is something your counsel and your LPs can live with, not a shadow-IT problem you discover later.

The first working systems ship during the first session — executives leave with tools running on their own work, not a list of ideas. The full arc is 90 days: baseline first, then rollout by function, then measured hours and dollars at day 30 and day 90. If a quarter goes by with nothing shipped, something is wrong. That is the standard we hold.

That is most of our work. Field services, vertical SaaS serving blue-collar industries, manufacturing, logistics — companies where the work is real and the software budget is not the product. The plays are different from a tech company’s (quoting, scheduling, reporting, back-office), but the operating math is the same: hours back, opex down, visibility up.

A large firm will happily spend two quarters producing a strategy document. This is the other lane: a senior operator who works directly with your executives and ships working systems weekly — for less than a third of what one $300K Head-of-AI hire costs a single portco. Many firms run both. The decks describe the future; this installs it.