I recently joined a group of CVC portfolio-company CEOs in Silicon Valley. During the trip, we met teams from OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, Menlo Ventures, Google, ICONIQ and saw first-hand how quickly the technology is changing.
The question that stayed with me was how do we turn AI’s capabilities into real value for real businesses.
It's a question we’ve been working on in our portfolio for some time. We’ve seen this at Zabka, the Polish convenience chain that, since our 2017 investment, developed AI tools to support dynamic pricing and decisions about where to open new stores. More recently, Radwell has applied AI to sales in a complex industrial parts business. In both cases, AI has helped the businesses make better decisions and serve customers better – that is where value is created.
The CEOs on the trek were candid about the challenge. Time savings are often easy to see; turning them into financial savings or stronger returns is harder. Access to AI is only the start, companies need to choose the right problems, give someone in the business responsibility and be clear about what success looks like.
That is why we believe it has to be CEO-led. The companies making the most progress are those where the CEO takes responsibility and focuses on a few bold moves, rather than a long list of pilots. In the CVC portfolio, the quality of the management team is central to every investment, starting with a strong CEO. That is why we are giving our CEOs direct exposure to AI and the ways it can create value.
The pace of change makes close partnerships important. We work with technology companies such as Google, AWS, Anthropic and OpenAI to help our portfolio companies access the latest tools and developments and may even place dedicated forward-deployed engineers in portfolio companies to help turn opportunities into action quickly.
We hold ourselves to account too, using AI for knowledge sharing, due diligence and to support investment decisions. Since 2020, AI opportunities and risks have been part of CVC’s investment committee discussions.
The response to the CEO treks has been encouraging. Since May this year, 74 CEOs from our portfolio companies across Asia, Europe and the US have taken part. CEOs on the Asia trek visited Alibaba, Ant, HK Vision and ByteDance. Ninety per cent said the trek was very or extremely helpful in understanding how AI can create value.
AI is a major shift for our portfolio, and it can bring substantial benefits to companies that move decisively. The opportunity is significant, but results depend on execution. Our job is to learn at pace, bring the right resources to our companies and help them focus on the moves that make a difference.