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Hi all, welcome back to the AI x PE weekly series. Last time, we went through how we would approach AI adoption. This week, let's get into something people keep asking about when we discuss AI with PE investors and PE portcos: what are some real AI use cases that help bring in revenue?
We've picked four revenue use cases that we've personally built before and think are broadly appcliable. We'll walk through how they work, where to start, and one that we’d personally put much further down the list.
We also have a busy October ahead at Road To Carry, with hands-on AI for PE workshops (AI for Market Mapping & Sourcing, AI at Portfolio Companies)
Let’s dive into today’s topic: four ranked use cases to help a business generate more revenue!
State of Play
Hi I’m Davis—an ex-PE investor who’s spent the last two years building and deploying AI tools across the world's largest investment banks, hedge funds, and private equity firms. Every Wednesday, Edwin and I will be closing the gap in AI knowledge in PE, one use case at a time.
Up until now, most people have thought about AI as a way to save time. You find a task that takes a few hours, get AI to do part of it, and calculate what those hours are worth. We've covered plenty of those use cases ourselves.
Yet we still see research showing how hard it is to turn AI adoption into financial returns. In McKinsey's 2026 State of AI survey, 80% of respondents said AI had improved their individual productivity, while only 37% attributed some enterprise-level EBITDA impact to AI.
Our view is that part of the disconnect comes from treating time saved as though it automatically becomes dollars saved. You can put the value of those hours into Excel, but if the company is paying the same people the same salaries and doing the same amount of business, the benefit hasn't necessarily made its way into EBITDA.
That's why so many conversations we've had come back to revenue use cases (and frankly which is why many of VC-backed AI rollups focus on revenue, which is a topic for another day). If AI helps you follow up with prospects you otherwise wouldn't have reached, or submit a bid you otherwise couldn't have finished, there's a commercial process you can follow through to a result.
Today we’re focusing on four examples:
1/ AEO (i.e., SEO for ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini),
2/ Cold outbound,
3/ Warm outbound, and
4/ Opportunities and proposals.
Here's how we'd compare their implementation effort and revenue potential, based on our experience.
