Jason Hauer | CEO, HauerX Holdings | February 2026
I talk to enterprise leaders every week who are investing heavily in AI. Most of them have made real progress. They have the models. They have the data teams. They have executive buy-in and a growing list of initiatives in motion across the business.
But here is what I keep hearing, especially from commercial leaders in financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing: the individual initiatives are not the problem. The problem is that no one has a clear picture of how all of those initiatives connect, compete for resources, or compound into something bigger than the sum of their parts.
They don't have an AI project problem. They have an AI portfolio problem.
And it is about to get a lot harder to manage.
The Capability Is Accelerating. The Coordination Isn't.
I wrote recently about the AI capability overhang, the widening gap between what AI systems can actually do and what most organizations are doing with them. That gap did not slow down. It accelerated.
December 2025 was a watershed moment. Three frontier models launched in six days: Claude Opus 4.5, GPT-5.1-Codex-Max, and Gemini 3. These are not incremental upgrades. They are agentic systems that work for hours, call tools, iterate on their own output, and correct mistakes without prompting. In January, Anthropic shipped Cowork, bringing agentic AI to non-technical knowledge workers for the first time. And just this week, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6 and OpenAI launched Frontier, its enterprise agent platform, on the same day. The pace is not letting up. It is compounding.
For enterprise leaders, this creates a cascading problem. Every new capability release generates a new wave of use cases across the business. Marketing sees opportunities. Operations sees opportunities. Finance, legal, product, customer experience, all of them are identifying ways to put AI to work. The backlog of AI initiatives is not shrinking. It is growing faster than most organizations can evaluate, approve, and deploy them.
That is the real story. The capability keeps improving. The adoption keeps expanding. And the infrastructure to coordinate all of it has not kept pace.
From Projects to Portfolio
A year ago, most enterprises were focused on getting a handful of AI use cases into production. That was the right priority. But the landscape has shifted. The average Fortune 500 company now has dozens of AI initiatives in various stages of development, approval, and deployment across multiple business units. Each one has its own stakeholders, compliance requirements, risk profiles, and timelines.
When you are running three pilots, you can coordinate by email and spreadsheet. When you are running thirty, and the backlog is growing every month as the models get more capable, you cannot. And the cost of poor coordination is not just inefficiency. It is strategic blindness. Leaders cannot see which initiatives are redundant, which are stalled in legal review, which have the highest commercial upside, or which ones are draining resources from higher-value bets.
This is the gap that separates companies making incremental progress from the ones compounding real business outcomes from AI.
Why This Matters on the Commercial Side
The governance conversation around AI tends to focus on risk, compliance, and responsible use. That matters. But there is a commercial cost to the coordination bottleneck that rarely gets discussed.
Every week an AI initiative sits in review limbo, the commercial team loses time to market. Every duplicate use case that slips through wastes budget that could fund a higher-impact bet. Every initiative that stalls because legal, data, and IT are working from different timelines is revenue left on the table.
For commercial leaders in regulated industries, this is especially acute. Financial services, healthcare, and insurance operate under real constraints. The review process exists for good reason. But when that process is fragmented across email chains, slide decks, and quarterly committee meetings, it becomes the bottleneck that prevents AI from delivering on its commercial promise.
The enterprises I see winning are the ones that have figured out how to run a structured, scalable review process that keeps governance tight while letting the commercial side of the house move at the speed the market demands.
Introducing AlignAI to the HauerX Portfolio
This is why I am excited to announce that AlignAI is joining the HauerX Holdings portfolio.
AlignAI is a purpose-built platform that helps AI Program Managers design and run a structured initiative review and approval process in one unified workspace. Instead of chasing stakeholders across legal, risk, data, and IT through email and slide decks, program managers get standardized workflows, automated compliance guardrails, and real-time visibility into where every initiative stands.
Think of it as the assembly line for AI initiatives. The same way manufacturing brought structure and repeatability to production, AlignAI brings structure and repeatability to the messiest part of enterprise AI: getting ideas refined, approved, and into the hands of people who can make them profitable.
The results are real. Customers like Bread Financial, Geisinger, and Worthington Steel are seeing 10x increases in program productivity and hitting $50M annual savings targets. That is not a pilot metric. That is enterprise-scale impact.
Why This Fits the HauerX Thesis
At HauerX, we back companies that help enterprises operationalize AI into real commercial outcomes. Not just governance checkboxes. Not just infrastructure. The part where AI actually starts generating revenue, reducing cost, and compounding into measurable business value.
The thing that is often missed in the governance conversation is that the same bottleneck slowing down risk reviews is also stalling the revenue-generating initiatives that actually grow the business. AlignAI fixes both problems with the same platform. When you give regulated enterprises a structured, scalable way to move AI from strategy to execution, you do not just reduce friction. You accelerate the commercial initiatives that compound into real business outcomes.
AlignAI sits between strategy and execution with native integrations into ServiceNow, Archer, and Workday, connecting the entire enterprise stack into one system of reference. For enterprises managing a growing portfolio of AI initiatives across multiple business units, this is the infrastructure layer that has been missing.
The Opportunity Ahead
Every bank, insurer, and healthcare system running an AI program faces the same coordination challenge. Dozens of initiatives, no single system of record, and a review process that was designed for a world that moved slower. The capability overhang is not going away. The models will keep getting better. The use cases will keep multiplying. The enterprises that build the infrastructure to manage that portfolio now will not just move faster. They will compound faster, because every initiative they approve and deploy feeds the next one.
The market is early, the pain is real, and no one else has staked a credible claim on this space. I think we are looking at a category-defining company, and I am looking forward to helping them get there.
Learn more about AlignAI on our portfolio page, or reach out to me directly at jason@hauerx.com.
