A Horizon Data Partners & Mangoteque Assessment
AI-ROI
AI Return on Investment — An Expert Analysis
AI adoption is widespread — but most organizations capture only a fraction of AI's potential value. AI-ROI is the expert-led assessment that identifies exactly what's holding you back and what to do about it.
Schedule a ConversationThe Research
Google's DORA research reveals that AI amplifies an organization's foundational strengths and weaknesses. Organizations that pair AI investments with the right foundational capabilities see outsized improvements in business outcomes. Those that don't risk accelerating technical debt, misallocating spend, and amplifying noise.
With AI spend at a typical portfolio company ranging from hundreds of thousands to several million dollars annually, the cost of misallocated investment dwarfs the cost of getting clarity first.
What We Assess
Foundational capabilities for AI effectiveness
These are the research-backed determinants of whether AI investments generate durable growth — or just accelerate the wrong things.
Why AI-ROI
The only assessment built around AI-readiness
Focused on Growth
The biggest opportunity from AI is growth, not cost reduction. AI-ROI identifies the foundational gaps that block AI from amplifying your core competency and accelerating your flywheel.
Protects Your AI Investment
Foundational gaps don't just limit AI ROI — some actively generate costly patterns like accelerated technical debt. AI-ROI ensures your AI spend compounds value, not debt.
Deeper Than Any Survey
AI-ROI is a hands-on assessment through in-depth interviews with your engineers and analysts — the people who know where the real gaps are. Not a self-completed survey.
Fast and Low-Burden
A few hours of interviews. Full results in 2–3 weeks. Recommendations ready to execute immediately through follow-on advisory services.
Built for PE Portfolios
Scales across your portfolio with firm-level and cross-portfolio insights. Deploy at any stage — diligence, 100-day plan, or pre-exit — and repeat to track progress over time.
Proven PE Specialists
A DevOps leader who gets engineering teams to a faster, AI-ready cadence and a PhD economist who ties data structures to business objectives — 50+ combined years across the two domains that determine whether AI investments pay off.
How It Works
An expert-led process, not a survey
Structured Interviews
In-depth conversations with your engineers and analysts — the people who know where the real gaps are. Deep without being burdensome.
Infrastructure & Policy Review
Evaluation of infrastructure, data documentation, organizational policies, and other available materials that surface real conditions on the ground.
Quantified Deliverable
Capability scores, peer benchmarking, archetype mapping, and a prioritized action plan with specific, executable next steps — delivered in 2–3 weeks.
What You Get
Actionable deliverables
The Team
Two specialists. Two sides of the same problem.
AI-enabled value creation depends on two foundational domains: how fast your engineering team can ship, and whether your data actually connects to business decisions. Most assessments cover one or the other. AI-ROI covers both — because they're inseparable.
Two PE specialists with deep transformation experience translate those conversations into quantitative scores, benchmarks, and a tailored action plan.
Author of DevOps Patterns for Private Equity and a top-rated PE conference speaker. Dave gets engineering teams to a faster, more agile delivery cadence — the kind that turns AI-driven code from a novelty into a compounding advantage. He works directly with CTOs and their teams to close the gap between where an organization ships today and where it needs to be to capture engineering alpha at exit.
Paul Karner, PhD
Horizon Data Partners
Data Strategy & Applied Economics
A PhD economist who has spent decades inside PE-backed organizations connecting data structures to actionable business objectives. Paul doesn't just assess whether your data is organized — he identifies where the gaps between your data and your growth levers are costing you real money, and builds the roadmap to close them. His economics-driven lens ensures every recommendation ties back to measurable business outcomes.
Across the Investment Lifecycle
Relevant at every stage
Diligence
Assess AI readiness pre-acquisition to price risk accurately and identify early value creation opportunities.
100-Day Plan
Prioritize the highest-impact foundational improvements to accelerate AI-enabled growth from day one.
Pre-Exit
Demonstrate AI-enabled growth capability to prospective buyers with quantitative, defensible data.
Because AI-ROI produces quantitative scores, it can be repeated — tracking progress at intervals or across portfolio subsets over time — generating longitudinal data that serves as a defensible, data-backed narrative for LPs and buyers.
Let's explore how your firm can leverage this data
Schedule a conversation with Paul to discuss how AI-ROI can work for your portfolio.
Schedule a Conversation with Paul