Turning AI Into Value Across Your Portfolio

A few years ago, we used AI for individual tasks, like drafting emails or summarizing documents. Today, AI agents can complete entire workflows that once required a person at every step.

These agents can understand information, plan next steps, and take action across the software your team uses.

Businesses can now use AI to optimize operations and create new sources of revenue. For PE firms, the question is where to apply it to deliver measurable results across the portfolio.

It’s one thing to use ChatGPT or Claude to analyze documents and write emails. It’s another to integrate AI into your operations.

Implementation starts with understanding and mapping how work gets done. Systems and data need to connect. Reliability needs to be tested and results measured. Someone needs to own the process and help teams adopt AI in their daily work.

These responsibilities often fall to team members already managing day-to-day operations.

Turning AI’s capabilities into business value takes dedicated time, technical expertise, and clear ownership.

Let’s address the elephant in the room: Who at your firm is responsible for tracking advances in AI and identifying where they can create value across your portfolio?

For PE firms, AI creates opportunities to grow revenue and improve margins across portfolio companies.

The starting point is finding everyday problems that hold a business back:

• Missed customers: Someone calls to ask about a service, but no one follows up. They choose another business.
• Too much paperwork: Employees spend hours copying information between systems instead of helping customers.
• Problems caught too late: A manager doesn’t notice that sales are falling at one location until the end of the month.

Each is an opportunity to use AI to improve results:

• Missed customers: Follow up with potential customers so fewer opportunities slip away.
• Too much paperwork: Handle routine paperwork so employees can serve more customers.
• Problems caught too late: Track sales across locations and flag problems so managers can act sooner.

Across a portfolio, these improvements can add up. Companies often face similar problems. A solution that works in one business can be adapted to others, saving time and reducing the need to start from scratch.

Start with a measurable win in one company. Use what works to build value across the portfolio.

Some of the largest investment firms, including Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs, are backing dedicated businesses that help companies build and deploy AI.

These investments highlight the work required to turn AI’s capabilities into business results. Leadership teams need to identify where AI can improve performance and bring in the expertise to implement it.

For PE firms, the opportunity extends across the portfolio. Each deployment can create experience, tools, and processes that make the next implementation more effective.

The largest firms are investing in the capabilities needed to capture that value.

How will your firm give portfolio companies the expertise and support to do the same?

Chelsea Labs partners with PE firms and their portfolio companies to improve operations and create new sources of revenue through AI and custom software.

We start by understanding how each business runs, mapping workflows across sales, operations, people, and finance. We identify where AI can make a measurable difference, then work with your team to build and deploy the solutions.

I’m Shiv Kaushal, founder of Chelsea Labs. Before founding the company in 2019, I worked at Deutsche Bank on an FX trading engine called Raptor and joined Stash as an early engineer.

We focus on two outcomes:

Optimize What Exists: Help teams handle more work without adding headcount.

• Automate paperwork, data entry, and approvals.
• Generate quotes, invoices, and payment reminders.
• Track performance across locations in one dashboard.

Create New Revenue: Build new offerings and reach more customers.

• Turn your business’s expertise into a paid AI tool.
• Launch subscription products and digital services.
• Build online sales channels to reach new customers.

We prioritize opportunities by business impact and implementation effort. Then we work with your team to design, build, and launch the solutions.

We start with one portfolio company and understand how the business functions. We focus on one clearly defined workflow. Together, we identify the opportunity, build and deploy a solution, and measure the results.

We work with leadership and the people closest to the work to understand your business, map key workflows and identify bottlenecks. We rank AI opportunities by business impact and implementation effort, then select the first project together.

You leave with a prioritized roadmap, a clear project scope, an estimated cost and timeline, and defined measures of success.

We design and build the solution around your operations. We connect it to the systems your team uses, test it against real scenarios and deploy it into your workflow.

We train your team and support adoption so the solution becomes part of how the work gets done.

We measure results against the baseline established during discovery. Depending on the workflow, that could mean hours saved, fewer errors, faster customer responses or higher sales conversion rates.

We use those results to improve the system and identify the next opportunity.

Prove the value in one company. Then apply what works across the portfolio.

Talk to one of our AI Strategists or Forward Deployed Engineers about your priorities. Together, we’ll identify a portfolio company to start with and outline an initial assessment.

Your first AI win starts with one company and a clear opportunity to improve operations or create new revenue.

Talk to one of our AI Strategists about your business’s priorities and our discovery process.