Services
AI consulting for private equity
AI consulting for private equity is two jobs, not one: reading AI honestly in a deal you are diligencing, and finding where it actually moves EBITDA once you own the company. We do both, and the second one is where most of the value sits.
Diligence: reading AI in a target
Deal targets increasingly come with an AI story: a model that supposedly prices better, a product marketed as AI-powered, a plan that assumes automation savings. Some of it is real and some is a wrapper on someone else's API. In diligence we tell you which: what the model actually does, whether the data and the talent behind it are defensible, what it costs to run, and which of the projected savings survive contact with the operation. It is the same honest read we would want on our own money.
Value creation across the portfolio
Once you own a company, the question is where AI moves the number. Usually it is unglamorous: document-heavy back-office work, finance and reporting, customer operations, the manual steps between systems that a bolt-on acquisition left behind. We assess a portfolio company the same way every time, so a value-creation team can compare opportunities across the portfolio on one yardstick. Buy-and-build makes this sharper. The data is spread across acquisitions that never shared a system, and getting it into one place is often the precondition for anything AI sitting on top of it.
How we work with an operating team
We work to the operating partner or value-creation team, not around them. An engagement starts with a fixed-scope assessment ($20,000 to $80,000, 3–6 weeks; where in that range depends on scope: how many systems and teams we assess, company size, and regulatory exposure): a portfolio company gets a concrete plan with costs and sequence, or a deal gets a written AI read. Build work follows only if it earns it. Published 2026 ranges put a scoped production build at $50,000–$250,000. And that band is a single scoped build; multi-system, multi-year programs run seven figures and beyond, and scale like that is work we take. For a firm that wants a standing hand across the portfolio rather than project by project, ongoing advisory runs $5,000–$15,000 per month. And retainers at that band cover a steady advisory seat; embedded fractional leadership across a large organization prices well above it.
Who does the work
The senior people at Tillerbridge are Isaac Major, an operator who has run revenue and growth teams inside global enterprises, and Nick Major, an engineer who builds the systems. Backgrounds are on the about page. We are a young firm, so there are no fund names or portfolio-company logos here, and we will not borrow any. What we can show is published pricing, a repeatable assessment, and the senior people who do the work themselves. This is the private-equity shape of our broader AI consulting; the wider enterprise realities are on enterprise AI consulting, the governance side of a portfolio company is our AI risk assessment work, and a common portfolio sector has its own page in AI consulting for financial services.
Questions people ask
- Do you do commercial or technical diligence?
- Technical and operational: what the AI in a target actually is, whether it is defensible, what it costs to run, and which projected savings are real. We are not a substitute for your quality-of-earnings or legal diligence. We are the read on the AI claims specifically, which most diligence teams are not staffed to give.
- Can you assess several portfolio companies at once?
- Yes, and it is where the model works best. We use the same fixed-scope assessment on each, so your value-creation team can rank opportunities across the portfolio on one basis instead of a pile of vendor decks. Pricing scales with the number of companies and systems, not a flat multiple.
- How much does this cost?
- Every engagement starts with a fixed-scope assessment at $20,000 to $80,000 over 3–6 weeks; where in that range depends on scope: how many systems and teams we assess, company size, and regulatory exposure. A single deal read is a tighter scope than a full portco assessment. Build work is priced per scope after that; published 2026 ranges put a scoped production build at $50,000–$250,000, and that band is a single scoped build; multi-system, multi-year programs run seven figures and beyond, and scale like that is work we take. More context is in our AI consulting rates guide.
- We are mid-deal and moving fast. How fast can you turn a read around?
- An AI diligence read is a tighter scope than a full assessment, and we size it to the deal timeline. The honest constraint is that we take a limited number of live deals at once, so each gets senior attention. If we cannot do it justice inside your window, we will say so rather than half-do it.
Tell us about the work.
A few lines is enough. We read every enquiry ourselves and reply within one business day.