Enterprise Value

Most strategic plans being built right now will destroy enterprise value. Not eventually. In the next 36 months.

Twenty years of SaaS compounding teaches you one thing: the leaders who miss a platform shift don’t usually see it coming. They’re too busy defending the last one.

Agentic AI is that shift. And the EV levers that built great businesses over the last decade are being repriced fast. The companies still treating them as their primary growth engine are about to find out the hard way.

The problem isn’t that leaders don’t know AI is coming. It’s that they’re underestimating how completely it rewires where enterprise value actually comes from.

The EV levers being systematically missed:

The Commercial Operating Model being relatively untouched, despite the whole game changing, the selling and forgetting era is over, now value must be realised by your customers not just conveyed.

Expansion revenue is being left unarchitected. The best expansion motion in the agentic era isn’t upsell, it’s outcome compounding. Every workflow an agent touches is a revenue surface. Most companies aren’t pricing or packaging it.

Proprietary data is the most undervalued asset on the balance sheet. Decades of workflow, transaction and customer interaction data is a structural moat that AI makes exponentially more valuable. Nobody’s capitalising it into their EV story.

M&A is being used to buy revenue, not capability. The acquirers winning the next decade are buying orchestration layers, vertical AI IP and data density not ARR multiples on businesses whose monetization model is already being disrupted.

Gross margin expansion is the biggest untouched lever. Agentic delivery doesn’t just reduce cost, it structurally re-engineers the unit economics of revenue. The PE playbooks still modelling incremental efficiency are missing a non-linear margin opportunity.

Switching costs are being rebuilt from scratch and most companies don’t realise they’re losing them. The new lock-in isn’t integrations or workflows. It’s context, memory and trained outcomes. If you’re not engineering for that, your retention story is weaker than your last board deck suggested.

The companies I see getting this right have stopped asking “how do we grow revenue?” and started asking “how do we expand the economic footprint of every outcome we touch?” That reframe is worth a multiple.

The window is shorter than most boards appreciate. Get the strategy right now or spend 2027 explaining why you didn’t.