Interesting isn’t investable
Xavier Vallée, Founder, Sapionic
Introducing Xavier’s interview with Value Creation for Private Equity. Download the interview.
My interview with Value Creation for Private Equity is out, and the title says most of it: interesting isn’t investable.
The value creation opportunity with AI is not only in redesigning workflows, it is in automating the complex decisions inside them. It requires a new approach and a new mindset. It requires investments and patience. In return you get speed to market and productivity, you decouple your cost base from your revenue, you create new competitive advantages that translate, almost mechanically, as ROIC.
A few of the things we get into in this interview:
- Why your Copilot rollout will not move EBITDA, and the handful of levers that actually do. If you cannot trace a saving to a line in the accounts, assume it is not there.
- Why most AI programmes fail for the very reasons digital transformation did: no value-creation roadmap, no benefit realisation, and automating the wrong thing. The question that quietly collapses most ROI stories is “compared to what?”
- Why the year-one work nobody celebrates, data, integration, talent, is what produces the year-two returns, and why this has to be led from the C-suite, not the side of someone’s desk.
The whole argument comes down to one line I keep repeating to everyone I meet. It is about decisions, not workflows. Workflows only exist to manage complex decisions.
If you approach it like this, the value creation plan writes itself and you will approach the change agenda the right way. New paradigm = new approach.