The AI tools you’re familiar with, such as content writers, email assistants, and pitch deck generators, were just the warm-up. The leading Go-to-Market (GTM) teams are moving from consuming content to constructing solutions. They are using generative AI to build internal apps, customize data workflows, and eliminate low-value tasks altogether. This shift is more than a technological leap. It is a strategic one.”
One portfolio company builds a lead-routing system in-house that saves 200 hours per month. Another pays five figures a year for a bloated SaaS license doing 60 percent of the job. Suddenly, your internal benchmarks break. Efficiency gaps become boardroom problems. The fund starts asking, ‘Why aren’t our other teams doing this?’
If your role is to set GTM standards across the portfolio, this is now your lane. The mandate isn’t to adopt AI. It’s to use AI to reduce vendor dependency, free up talent, and improve operating leverage. The companies that figure this out first don’t just grow faster. They grow smarter, with far more control over their cost structure.
This doesn’t mean every portco needs a dev team. It means the commercial function must collaborate differently with the technical function. It means your RevOps lead may become the most valuable person in the building. Not for reporting, but for engineering workflows that once required four tools and two weeks.
You Don’t Need More Tech. You Need to Spot the Builders.
The real shift isn’t more AI tools. It’s what happens when your hidden builders start creating with them. One builder with the right mandate can reclaim hours, cut vendor costs, and set a new standard for efficiency across the portfolio. Here’s how a typical workflow changes when AI is introduced.
This evolution isn’t about hiring an AI engineer. It’s about identifying who in your organization is already capable of building, testing, and scaling with AI as their co-pilot. Most portcos already have one or two of these individuals. They’re often hiding in RevOps, sales engineering, or IT. They’re curious, fast-moving, and often under-leveraged.
Your job isn’t to become their manager. It’s to create space for them to show what’s possible. Give this group permission to build and the right constraints to guide their focus. They’ll deliver tools that make the rest of the team more productive, more autonomous, and far less reliant on legacy vendors.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Who in your commercial org has built macros, scripts, or connectors to fix broken processes?
- What recurring internal requests could be solved with a lightweight internal app?
- Where could one AI-accelerated builder take 20 percent of work off your team’s plate next quarter?
The ROI here is not theoretical. A single AI-powered solution, like auto-generating follow-up emails from sales call transcripts, can reclaim hours every week across the sales org. Multiply that by rep count, and you start seeing what scale looks like.
Governance Without Friction: Setting the Right AI Foundation
Let’s be clear: this cannot devolve into another “shadow IT” scenario. But if your response is to wrap these initiatives in red tape, you will kill them before they start. The solution isn’t more approval steps. It’s lightweight governance and fast feedback loops. That means clear standards around data privacy, security, and integration. It also means making enablement part of the system from day one.
At Cortado, we’ve helped portcos stand up internal AI playbooks that balance speed and safety. The goal is not to slow down experimentation, it’s to channel it in the right direction. With basic frameworks in place, your best people can do their best work without introducing risk to the business.
Here’s what this looks like in practice:
- A “build-and-show” culture with quick demos, peer feedback, and visible prototypes.
- Shared GitHub or Notion hubs to document tools, templates, and learnings.
- Quarterly showcases where teams present what they’ve built and share performance impact.
Over time, these practices turn into an operating rhythm. That rhythm builds institutional knowledge, improves talent retention, and creates a backlog of high-impact projects no vendor can sell you.
AI as Moat. Defensible, Custom, and Fund-Wide.
Here is where the upside multiplies. Once one portco builds a successful tool, for example a lightweight AI-powered renewal tracker, you can adapt it across the fund. You’re not repeating vendor evaluations or reinventing process flows. You’re scaling institutional IP.
Better yet, these assets become part of your investment narrative. In diligence, buyers won’t just see a mature sales org. They’ll see internal systems that drive efficiency, built in-house and tied directly to financial outcomes. That’s a story with teeth.
Consider the shift in competitive position:
- One portco automates onboarding workflows with an internal app that cuts launch time in half.
- Another still relies on manual processes and vendor templates, burning hours at every touchpoint.
Multiply that over two years. Which company gets the higher multiple?
What to Do Now
You don’t need a five year roadmap. You need three wins delivered by the end of this quarter. Start by identifying one builder inside one portco who’s already experimenting with AI. Give them a use case. Give them thirty days. Make the impact visible.
Then rinse and scale.
Cortado helps PE commercial leaders do exactly that. We’re not pushing a tool. We’re not launching another transformation initiative. We are building a portfolio capability, quietly and quickly, in ways that show results where they count.
If you’re ready to turn AI from line item into leverage, let’s talk. We’ll help you move fast and stay smart.
