As I’m just boarding a 6am flight to SuperReturn US West starting Monday, this issue covers a successful AI implementation by Hg that shows how operations + delivery can turn LLM and agentic buildouts into working systems.
We see comparable results at a smaller scale at DevriX and Growth Shuttle, and recognizing the $110 billion under management with Hg, this experiment is large-scale enough to make a difference.
Internal transformation and operational efficiency is an obvious takeaway after 20+ integrations over the past couple of years. The wildcard remains revenue and GMV growth.
Given fixed P&L lines, increasing EBITDA through operational efficiency is now possible and is being implemented weekly across PE portfolio companies. The same amount of work can be delivered with smaller and nimble teams.
But “inventing” more work is the elephant in the room for the vast majority of companies. All service firms are under pressure: from tech/IT through finance and some legal to interior design or architecture or game design. After all, if a creative project can be deliver for 20% of the effort, or even half, this doesn’t automatically double or triple the workload and demand out of thin air.
The new agentic economy poses new problems, questions, and challenges. Maintaining agentic systems is expensive. So are tokens. And company utilization now sits in slimmer org charts with shorter time frames and fewer entry-level members to do the mundane work and free up some creative space.
The current level of progress is unsustainable, even if Dario and Sam are both calling out for slowing AI progress down this week. But what does the next stage of agentic augmentation look like?
Comment with your predictions and case studies from the real world.
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Hg Booked $260M of EBITDA Impact Across 1,600 Portfolio AI Projects
Mario Peshev
