The Bottleneck No Spreadsheet Could Fix
A global private equity (PE) firm specializing in investments across the software and cybersecurity sectors has a portfolio of over 15 companies. The firm focuses on acquiring high-potential businesses, accelerating operational efficiency, and creating long-term enterprise value. Yet the group’s collective muscle felt weak. Playbooks languished unseen, benchmark emails crawled for days, and C-suites reinvented fixes their peers had already cracked.
There was more. For instance, compliance exposure. Without a central audit trail, regulatory lapses were a growing threat. Finally, the C-suite leaders lacked a secure home for playbooks, data, and private forums.
In a market where exits hinge on speed, with 15+ portfolio companies (and more on the shopping list) the firm faced a brutal math problem: learning velocity < deployment velocity. Leadership set a target that would break the bottleneck:
Goal: Give every C-level leader the entire portfolio’s experience in < 5 minutes—no extra headcount, no extra licenses.
From Dashboards to Reasoning
Dashboards were plentiful; actionable reasoning wasn’t. That diagnosis shaped a crawl-walk-run plan: first surface what we already know, then measure it, finally let AI reason on top. Persistent Systems co-ran deep-dive workshops and distilled the ask into a three-phase roadmap:
- Curate & Connect – one secure workspace for playbooks, toolkits, and peer Q&A.
- Measure & Benchmark – live Power BI dashboards with natural-language queries.
- Reason & Advise – Insight Buddy, a Generative AI assistant that interprets questions and cites sources.
The key Ingredients included power BI executive dashboards that surfaced anonymised peer benchmarks with natural-language Q&A.
Engineering the “Always-On Brain”
Persistent built on Microsoft’s stack to move fast and stay compliant.
| Layer | Purpose |
| A2A Orchestration | Agents co-reason across finance, ops, and compliance data. |
| MCP Input Mesh | Streams Power BI, SQL, SharePoint—no custom ETL. |
| RAG + Knowledge Graph | Grounds every answer in verifiable facts. |
Key Ingredients:
- SharePoint Syntex auto-tag every playbook for pinpoint search.
- Power Apps & Azure Communication Services host role-based boards (CFO Forum, CISO Roundtable).
- Azure OpenAI & Power Virtual Agents power Insight Buddy—answers in plain English, source-linked.
The Five-Minute Epiphany
Launch week, a CFO typed: “How does my EBITDA margin compare with peers above $100 M ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue), and which two playbooks moved the needle?”
Four days of back-and-forth shrank to under five minutes. Insight Buddy – a Generative AI-powered assistant using Azure OpenAI, Power Virtual Agents, Azure AI Search, and SQL returned a peer-weighted chart, linked the cost-optimization toolkit, and scheduled a CFO-only huddle.
Goal met on day one. Sceptics turned into evangelists overnight.
Hard Impact, Zero Guesswork
Six months after going-live the deltas were measurable:
| Metric | Before | After |
| Time to insight | ~4 days | < 5 min |
| Accuracy | – | 90 %+ unstructured, 85–90 % structured |
| Cross-company collaboration | Baseline | +60 % |
| Licensing cost for 1,000 execs | New seats required | $0 (guest Single Sign-on) |
| Exec productivity | Email chains | Self-serve answers |
| Time-to-value | Multi-quarter builds | Phased rollout in 12-15 months |
Within six months, the platform was shortlisted for an IDC Future Enterprise award, and the client supported Persistent’s reference submission to a leading GenAI survey.
Analysts see the same pattern. McKinsey notes Generative AI can automate 50–70 % of due-diligence tasks, compressing time-to-insight and expanding discovery.
Why It Works
Numbers beg an explanation—here’s the design logic that produced them.
| Design Principle | Shift Delivered |
| Azure AD Guest SSO | 1,000+ execs, zero new licenses. |
| Agentic reasoning | Replaces 4-day email loops. |
| Governance by design | Crucial for multi-company data sharing. |
| Enterprise-grade security | Microsoft’s secure workplace stack & granular data governance. |
| First-to-Market execution | Delivered one of the sector’s first GenAI collaboration platforms. |
Persistent’s Co-Innovation Blueprint
That logic isn’t luck; it’s the result of a repeatable, five-step playbook.
- Strategic Co-creation mindset – workshops turned pain points into roadmap.
- Enterprise-Grade Security and Performance: Delivered via Microsoft’s secure digital workplace ecosystem
- Accelerated Build and Deployment: Enabled through Persistent’s Collaborate360 low-code accelerator
- AI Expertise with Proven Results: Early GPT-3.5 access (via Microsoft partnership) elevated accuracy, performance and reliability of GenAI Insight Assistant
- First-to-Market Execution: Persistent’s first production-scale GenAI deployment—now a flagship success story
From Insight Lag to Portfolio Lift
Stack the results, principles, and method together, and the transformation arc becomes impossible to miss.
Four days to five minutes—that’s the delta between reacting and leading. The Generative AI platform proves AI in private equity isn’t hype; it’s a compounding asset. With Persistent, the firm institutionalized best practices, unlocked portfolio-wide synergy, and laid tracks for the next horizon—three-phase roll-out over 12-15 months
Ready to shrink your insight gap? Let’s build the next five-minute answer together.
