M&A advisory
AI left this M&A broker too much in the loop
Voice latency, piecemeal marketing and five parallel tasks: three places AI handed the last step back to M&A broker Christine McDannell.
Galina Fendikevich
Founder and Editor
Public relations
Can AI write comms copy that anyone remembers?
Not from scratch, says Sam Polstein: models have no emotion and a recognisable tone. Three mitigations he uses, and the fifty percent draft to never send.
Hospitality
What Sofiane Ghorbel's team does after a client lands in Rome
Luxury trip follow-up runs on phone calls to every supplier. Sofiane Ghorbel: it takes a lot of time, it creates loyalty, and no tool exists.
Yacht charter
Five hundred loops from an operator to the product she needs
Jennifer Kerum is trying to build her own charter platform. The tooling is still five hundred loops away, and intake is what she would automate first.
Construction
How to judge an AI vendor when you cannot judge the software
A $20 million business run on sticky notes cannot tell a real AI product from a wrapper. Annija Eizenarma on what to evaluate instead of the technology.
Health & wellness
Claude wrote the specification. A human still had to deploy it
A health practitioner built fifteen AI skills and could only fix the skills. The gap between a machine-written spec and a running system is the product.
Restaurants
Four products a first-time restaurant owner would have paid for
A pre-inspection spec sheet, print-ready design, recipe costing, budgeting. Dr. Nikki Siso named four gaps while opening for $85,000.
M&A advisory
The $5 million valuation on $125,000 of net profit
An AI report valued a business at $5 million on $125,000 of net profit by counting expenses as assets. The broker's guidance was a 3-4x multiple.
Public relations
AI is bad at media lists, and the reason is not data
Media list building resists AI because the task is predicting an unwritten story from private signals. Sam Polstein's freshness threshold: three weeks.
Hospitality
Why AI personalization fails for luxury hotel guests
The privacy paradox, in Sofiane Ghorbel's words: the better the personalization, the more data AI needs from the clients least willing to give it.
Yacht charter
The client who circled ChatGPT's answer in pen
A charter client asked ChatGPT if he could anchor in 25 knots of wind, was told yes, and overruled the captain. What it costs the operator.
Construction
The AI pilot that dies in month three of data collection
Integration costs of $500,000, contracts running five to ten years, and onboarding that takes months: why AI deals in legacy industries die before output.