Creating Operating Leverage with AI: Our Panel at Boston Tech Week

Boston held its first Tech Week this year, and we wanted to establish a presence in a city where so much of the private-equity and operations world lives. On Thursday, May 28, at Tishman Speyer's ZO Clubhouse on 125 High Street, we hosted “Creating Operating Leverage with AI,” an exclusive panel and networking mixer for PE operating partners on AI value creation, in partnership with Studio by Tishman Speyer.

Our strategic advisor Vir Kashyap moderated, joined by:

• Emily A. Chien — Executive Fellow, Harvard Business School; former IBM AI Global Offering & Partnerships Leader
• Janet Michel — VP of Global Parts Operations & Supplier Partnerships, PartsSource (a Bain Capital portfolio company)
• Ritwick Rane — Chief Transformation Officer, PDC Brands (a CVC-backed portfolio company)

The question at the center: are you deploying AI into the right workflows, or degrading portfolio value? The discussion followed how human oversight applied to the wrong decision layer actively degrades portfolio outcomes. Before mandating governance controls, operators need to map the decision architecture first, which workflows compound value with human judgment, and which ones just add latency and risk.

Many of InstaLILY's customers are PE-owned, and the conversation reflected it: practical, numbers-first, and focused on the messy, manual side of distribution, supply chain, and field services.

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