Are you leaving margin on the table? AI can find it.

The tension between top-line growth and bottom-line health is a common challenge for many organizations, both public and private. Decision-making is often shaped by factors like stakeholder timelines, tolerance for short-term disruption, available capital, etc.

These same organizations may manage diverse portfolios where some business units enjoy healthy, premium margins, while others operate in more commoditized spaces, yielding margins around half of their higher-margin counterparts. This can mask underperformance, misallocate resources, and pressure leaders toward short-term margin fixes like price hikes or supplier squeezing, actions known to erode customer trust and invite competition.

Rather than asking customers or suppliers to bear the burden, organizations can now build and use new tools with AI to structurally reduce costs without reducing value.

In my most recent role, we worked with Google Cloud to build a new way to manage product lifecycles. By implementing technologies like Vertex AI, BigQuery, and Gemini, teams were able to dramatically accelerate product design, gain valuable performance insights from a global user base, and extend product lifecycles through intelligent redesign. Such initiatives have the potential to increase engineering productivity by up to 70%.

But the real breakthrough, in my opinion, was the unprecedented speed at which we moved from AI pilot to measurable P&L gains. This wasn't just about cutting costs once; it was about architecting intelligence into the product lifecycle for sustained margin improvement across the board.

This is a defensible, non-headcount dependent lever for performance improvement and is a master-class in how tech partnerships allow strategic enablement, not just technical success. It shows how AI investments can address both short-term financial needs and long-term competitive advantages, empowering leaders to move from short-sighted cost measures to long-term capability development.

Learn more about the partnership and project here.