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For Private Equity & Executive Teams

The AI Reality Check

Before you wire the money — or fund another year of "AI initiatives" — know what's real. Three weeks. Fixed price. A verdict your investment committee can act on.

Request a Scope Call
3 WeeksFixed timeline
Fixed PriceNo hourly meters
6 DimensionsScored 0–100
1 ReadoutPartner-level, one hour
Why This Exists

Most AI stories don't survive contact with an operator.

The majority of enterprise AI pilots never reach production. Demos are rehearsed. Costs are understated. The "AI team" is one engineer whose departure would end everything. If you're acquiring a company — or own one whose AI spend keeps growing while production stays empty — the most expensive thing you can do is not look.

Deal-side

You're diligencing a target whose deck says "AI-powered." Is it a defensible capability or a wrapper around someone else's API? The answer changes the price.

Portfolio-side

A portco has spent two years and seven figures on AI with nothing in production. We find out why — and what it actually takes to fix it.

Board-side

Management says the AI program is on track. You need an independent, operator-grade read before approving the next tranche.

The Deliverables

What you get in three weeks.

The AI Truth Report

What's actually real in the AI and data estate versus what's theater — written plainly, with evidence, by someone who builds these systems for a living.

The Scorecard

A 0–100 score across six dimensions: data readiness, talent dependency, security & governance, cost reality, vendor lock-in, and profit potential.

The Cost-to-Fix Ledger

What it really costs to industrialize what exists — in numbers, not adjectives. Including what to kill.

The 100-Day Plan

Exactly what we'd do first if we owned it — prioritized by EBITDA impact, delivered in a one-hour partner readout.

The Method

AI-accelerated diligence, operator judgment.

Our own AI agents sweep the data room, codebase, and architecture in days — the same tooling that has reverse-engineered hundreds of thousands of lines of legacy code in a single day. Then the founder applies the judgment that tooling can't: what's defensible, what's fragile, what's worth fixing. That's why this takes three weeks, not three months.

Week 1 — Sweep

Agent-driven analysis of the data room, systems, code, and cloud estate. Interviews scheduled.

Week 2 — Deep-Dive

Architecture review, key-person interviews, cost forensics, security and governance assessment.

Week 3 — Verdict

Report, scorecard, cost ledger, 100-day plan — delivered in a one-hour partner readout.

Credibility

We ran it on ourselves first.

The same audit was run against our founders' own AI portfolio. The result: the systems that survived run in daily production — and the ones that didn't earn their keep were killed. That's the standard your target gets held to. Ask for the sample report on the scope call.

Who actually does the work?

The founder — a sitting Chief AI Officer and CIO who builds and runs production AI at enterprise scale — supported by our AI tooling. No leverage model, no associates learning on your deal.

Deal-side or portfolio-side?

Both. Deal-side engagements run under your diligence NDA and timeline. Portfolio-side engagements typically end with a 100-day plan the operating partner can hand straight to management.

What do you need from the target?

Data-room access, architecture documentation if it exists, cloud billing exports, and 3–5 hours of interviews with the technical owner(s). We work read-only.

Is the price really fixed?

Yes — one fixed fee, quoted on the scope call, three weeks, defined deliverables. No hourly meters, no change orders. Timeline pressure on a live deal? Tell us on the scope call.

What happens after?

Many engagements end at the readout — that's fine. Where the 100-day plan calls for deployment, we can execute it, including the AI Sales Team. That's always your call, never a condition.

There's a deal on your desk right now.

Fifteen minutes to scope it. We'll tell you on that call whether the Reality Check will pay for itself — and if it won't, we'll say so.

Request a Scope Call