On the surface, companies and PE deal teams want the same thing: the company to succeed. But even when both sides are aligned, there's a gap between seeing an opportunity and actually capturing it.
AI has made that gap wider. Every firm can point to places where AI should be growing revenue or improving margins, and every portfolio company CEO is being asked what they're doing about it. So far, most of the answers are pilots: a new tool here, a proof of concept there, and very little that shows up in EBITDA.
I've seen this gap from the inside. My own company was acquired by private equity after 14 years of operation. Our company wanted to do well, and our board genuinely wanted to help. We weren't short on ideas for where to improve. We were short on capacity and focus, and on a shared understanding of what was really holding us back. Both sides still found ourselves surprised by forecast changes that dramatically changed our operating plan.
The real bottleneck is rarely the technology. When an AI initiative stalls, it's usually because of something a tool can't fix on its own: a process nobody redesigned, a team that doesn't trust the output, data that lives in someone's inbox, or a system that doesn't connect to anything else. Getting real results from AI means rethinking how the organization works around it.
That's how we built Talas. We start with an AI Value Creation Assessment, talking to the people who do the work, to find the opportunities that matter and the real bottleneck behind each one. Then our forward-deployed engineers work alongside the company's team to build solutions that account for the whole organization: its culture, processes, systems and tools. And the Talas AI Portfolio Ops Platform gives the firm and the company a shared, honest record of what changed.
A shared truth about performance, and about problems, is still where value creation starts. What matters now is what the firm and the company do with it, together.
