AI value creation at Access Holdings

AI adoption across the Access Holdings deal team was uneven. Some team members had built ChatGPT, Copilot and other tools into daily workflows. Others had tried them once and stopped. The firm had no shared method for applying AI to its highest-value work: portfolio performance analysis, LP communication synthesis and due diligence.

General Purpose delivered customised in-person Mastering ChatGPT workshops for 27 members of the Access Holdings deal team, plus an AI in Action keynote for the whole firm. Two hours of discovery before the workshops shaped the customisation, so every example and exercise ran on real Access Holdings work: deal sourcing, portfolio monitoring and LP communications. AI Opportunities surveys before and after the programme measured the change.

• The Access Holdings deal team recorded a 33% increase in time saved after training.
• The firm recovered £263,000 in annual productivity, which returned 20 times the cost of the programme in year one.
• 89% of participants said they would recommend the training to a colleague.

• Portfolio performance analyser: tracks quarterly valuation trends across the book
• LP communications synthesiser: pulls investor narratives together across multiple documents
• Contract review assistant: summarises key terms, flags risks and checks SEC compliance
• MD&A commentary generator: drafts commentary from financial data, saving 2 to 3 hours monthly
• News feed analyser: reviews industry news and assigns items to relevant prospects
• Document processing tools: handles high-volume document intake and extraction

Access Holdings backs essential service businesses across North America, focusing on value creation inside each asset. The firm wanted the people running those businesses to lead on AI, applied to live work in companies that look nothing like each other. A car wash platform running subscription customers at scale has a different AI opportunity to a sports media business selling local sponsorship inventory, and the day had to serve both in the same room.

Much of the cohort came from the ACE Programme, Access Creating Executives, the firm's talent track that places operators into portfolio companies to drive performance and lead value creation. Building AI capability into that group puts it straight into the businesses.

Operators came from across the portfolio, alongside Access Holdings staff:

• Spotless Brands: express and flex car wash
• Playfly Sports: local media rights and sponsorship sales
• Zeus Fire and Security: fire systems, intrusion, access control and video
• WagWay Group: pet daycare, boarding and grooming
• Alliance Marine: coastal marine assets and operations
• Access Holdings: deal and portfolio operations

General Purpose delivered a full-day Mastering Claude session for the portfolio company executives.

The day ran in four parts:

1. 1The fundamentals
2. 2Building repeatable workflows
3. 3Building agents
4. 4Show and tell: every attendee presented what they had built

The show and tell is where the value creation argument lands. Each operator left holding something that works on their own numbers, their own customers and their own reporting cycle, which is what turns a training day into a change inside the business.

• Recurring report generation: produces the same reports each cycle
• Financial reporting and business review prep: automates monthly management reporting
• Strategy documents and financial models: drafts and builds core deal and planning material
• Competitive analysis: researches and compares market positions
• Workflow automation: removes repeated manual steps across a process
• Customer upsell triggers: flags cross-sell and upsell opportunities