The discipline that built your biggest wins, running innovation as a balanced portfolio of bets, is exactly what turns scattered AI wins into compounding advantage. Time to point it at the commercial side of the business.
It's the same discipline that built your product pipeline, your brand portfolio, your capital plan: innovation, run as a portfolio of bets, balanced on purpose. Leaders have trusted it for decades. Almost nobody is running it on AI, and that gap is the difference between collecting wins and compounding them.
The wins are real, and they're everywhere. Brand teams reading culture in days instead of quarters. Ops groups handing themselves back a thousand hours. Big teams setting the standard, and the bar is rising fast. That's worth celebrating. It's also the entry fee. The leaders pulling ahead have moved to the next question: what does all of it add up to?
List every AI effort your teams are running (the pilots, the copilots, the experiments nobody asked permission for) and you're not looking at a set of projects. You're looking at a portfolio. It has a shape. And almost nobody chose that shape. It accumulated, one reasonable decision at a time.
The three rings, in the market, right now
Here's what the three rings of that portfolio look like with AI, in the market, right now.
Improving what exists. Unilever built digital twins of its products, so one 3D master generates every piece of content. The result: production costs down 55%, output 65% faster. Same marketing engine, meaningfully better economics. That's the first ring, and it's real money.
Stretching into adjacent territory. Coca-Cola, the story I shared two weeks ago, built a capability it didn't have: a real-time newsroom that answers every World Cup moment while fans are still arguing. The campaign became an engine the company keeps. New muscle, built on a base they already owned.
Changing the game. Nubank, Brazil's digital bank, started selling phone plans inside its banking app and crossed a million subscribers. A bank became a carrier, because it understood what its customers would trust it to bundle. That's the ring where a bet redraws what your company is.
Now run your portfolio instinct over your own AI efforts, and you'll likely see what I see inside most companies: nearly everything sits in the first ring, and nobody chose that shape. Your instinct would never allow that anywhere else.
The quiet cost of an unmanaged portfolio
The unmanaged portfolio carries a cost that compounds quietly. One figure making the rounds, worth treating as directional rather than gospel, holds that the large majority of AI initiatives never deliver positive ROI. In my experience, the bottleneck lives in the operating model around the AI: the approvals, the handoffs, the queue. Without a portfolio view, budget flows to whoever's loudest while the highest-impact initiatives sit untouched. A nine-month approval cycle is a nine-month delay on revenue. And some of your most expensive people spend their hours running process instead of creating value.
So let me ask you what I'd ask over coffee. Do you know the value of your commercial AI portfolio as it stands today? Do you know where you're overbuilding and where you're underinvested? Do you know exactly what's blocking your most valuable initiatives from reaching the market? If those answers are fuzzy, the shape is choosing itself.
If you can't see the portfolio, you can't manage it, you can't improve it, and you certainly can't accelerate it.
The good news is the playbook scales directly to this moment. Board of Innovation, one of our portfolio companies, has been teaching the AI version for years. They call it the Three Waves (efficiency, enhanced quality, and new systems) and their counsel lands the whole idea in one line: invest across all three at once, with a clear vision for the third. Their portfolio-mapping tools are open-source, which tells you something. The discipline is available to everyone. The differentiator is whether a leader actually runs it.
That's where compounding comes from. Balanced and sequenced, the first-ring wins pay for the adjacent bets. The adjacent wins buy you the credibility and cash to chase your Nubank. And every quarter the flywheel spins faster. That's the difference between having AI wins and having an engine. It is a difference of shape, not spend. If you want a head start, your central AI team likely has a version of this view already; governance forced them to build it. Borrow it, then run it the way you run the rest of your portfolio.
What to do this week
Run your playbook once, on this. Take thirty minutes. List every AI effort your commercial teams are running, and place each one in a ring: improving what exists, stretching adjacent, or exploring what could change the game. Look at the shape.
Then make the three moves you'd make in any portfolio review:
Retire one redundant bet in the safe ring.
Fund the adjacent bet you actually believe in.
Write down the one game changing question your team has earned the right to explore this quarter.
You've run this exact exercise on products and brands a hundred times. Same muscle, newest capability.
From the portfolio
The same idea runs through two of our companies, at opposite ends of the work.
Board of Innovation owns the strategy end: the AI transformation studio that rewires how enterprises create value, and the source of the Three Waves framework and the open source portfolio tools above. Start there if the shape of your portfolio is the question.
AlignAI owns the operating end: every initiative in one view, ranked by business impact, risk weighed, approvals unified. One of the ten largest US banks runs 130+ AI initiatives through it and moves them to approval three times faster. The results show up in dollars: high value initiatives reaching market in weeks instead of nine months, and up to $50M a year in value unlocked. Start there if seeing and accelerating the portfolio is the question.
If you'd like to learn more about either, reach out and let's connect.
Your teams earned the wins, and that's worth celebrating. The bigger opportunity is the one you're best equipped for: running those wins the way you've always run innovation, as a portfolio, shaped on purpose, built to compound.
You've trusted this playbook your whole career. What happens when you run it on AI?
Talk Tuesday,
Jason Hauer
Founder & CEO, HauerX Holdings
jason@hauerX.com
Jason Hauer is the founder and CEO of HauerX Holdings, where he backs and builds a portfolio of AI-native companies that accelerate how businesses grow, operate, and compete. From mid-market to Fortune 500.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the three rings of an AI innovation portfolio?
Improving what exists (Unilever built digital twins of products, cutting production costs 55% and speeding output 65%). Stretching into adjacent territory (Coca-Cola built a real-time World Cup newsroom that answers every moment while fans are still arguing). Changing the game (Nubank, Brazil's digital bank, started selling phone plans in its banking app and crossed a million subscribers). Most companies have nearly everything in the first ring and nobody chose that shape.
What are Board of Innovation's Three Waves?
Efficiency, enhanced quality, and new systems. Their counsel lands the idea in one line: invest across all three at once, with a clear vision for the third. Their portfolio-mapping tools are open-source, which tells you something. The discipline is available to everyone. The differentiator is whether a leader actually runs it.
Why do most AI initiatives never reach ROI?
The bottleneck lives in the operating model around the AI: the approvals, the handoffs, the queue. Without a portfolio view, budget flows to whoever's loudest while the highest-impact initiatives sit untouched. A nine-month approval cycle is a nine-month delay on revenue. And some of your most expensive people spend their hours running process instead of creating value.
How do I run a portfolio review on AI in 30 minutes?
List every AI effort your commercial teams are running, and place each one in a ring: improving what exists, stretching adjacent, or exploring what could change the game. Then make three moves: retire one redundant bet in the safe ring, fund the adjacent bet you actually believe in, and write down the one game-changing question your team has earned the right to explore this quarter.
Where does AlignAI fit in the AI portfolio problem?
AlignAI gives you the portfolio view: every initiative in one view, ranked by business impact, risk weighed, approvals unified. One of the ten largest US banks runs 130+ AI initiatives through it and moves them to approval three times faster. The results show up in dollars: high-value initiatives reaching market in weeks instead of nine months, and up to $50M a year in value unlocked.
