The right AI partner for a portfolio company finds where AI adds earnings, builds it inside the company, gets people using it, and proves the gain each month. These ten questions separate the firms that do that from the ones that sell a tool or a roadmap.
| Question | A good answer | A warning sign |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Where does the work start? | A short, fixed-price review built on the company’s own numbers | A platform license or a long strategy phase before anything is priced |
| 2. How is each opportunity tied to earnings? | A business case per opportunity, in EBITDA terms, from a baseline in the company’s records | Benefits quoted as industry averages |
| 3. Do you build, or only advise? | The same team scopes, builds and runs the system | A roadmap handed to the company to carry out |
| 4. Who works inside the company? | Engineers who sit with the people doing the work | Everything run remotely from a template |
| 5. How do you get people to use it? | A named owner, weekly meetings and a usage goal with a date | One training session at launch |
| 6. Does a person stay in control? | People approve anything that reaches a customer, and overrides are logged | Agents that send or change records on their own from day one |
| 7. How do you prove it worked? | A monthly scoreboard of use, quality, results and running cost, against the business case | Activity counts with no baseline |
| 8. What if nothing is worth building? | They say so, and the company keeps the findings | Every review ends in a build proposal |
| 9. Who owns what you build? | The company owns its data and every output, and the terms say what happens if it stops | Outputs locked inside the vendor’s platform |
| 10. Can it run across the portfolio? | One model across companies, reported in one format the operating team can compare | A different approach and report in every company |
The three questions that matter most
If there is only time for three, ask questions 2, 5 and 7. A partner who ties every opportunity to earnings, owns adoption, and reports the result each month is a partner whose work will show up in the value creation plan.
How ClearForge answers them
Our answers are on the page, not behind a sales call: how we find and measure the value, how we build, and how portfolio work runs.