What Can AI Change in a Japanese PE Portfolio Company? Creating Future Value from Brain Capital
By Naoki KadowakiFounder, President & CEO, VURA Capital Innovation Holdings Inc.
Use AI to prepare documents faster. Improve customer support. Assist development and analysis.
As companies pursue these applications, VURA asks a question about competitive advantage:
When AI is widely available, why will customers choose this company?
VURA’s view is that, as general knowledge and analytical capabilities become more accessible, companies must examine how their distinctive experience, judgment, and customer understanding can contribute to business value.
Identify the Brain Capital Within the Company
VURA uses the term Brain Capital to describe the knowledge, experience, and judgment accumulated within an enterprise.
Examples include an experienced technician’s ability to recognize early signs of failure, a salesperson’s understanding of the underlying problem behind a customer request, and an operator’s knowledge of how to handle complex exceptions.
These capabilities may remain concentrated in particular individuals rather than being adequately reflected in manuals, systems, or shared processes.
For a PE portfolio company, they can be both a source of strength and a constraint on growth. Adding salespeople or delivery staff may not expand effective capacity if critical decisions still depend on a small number of experienced employees.
Start AI Transformation with Distinctive Capabilities
To put Brain Capital to work, first identify which judgments support customer value.
Which knowledge, if shared more effectively, could improve customer service? Which experience could help less experienced employees or other functions perform more demanding work? Which decisions still require specialist involvement?
Management can then design knowledge organization, access and usage rights, retrieval mechanisms, and output validation.
Introducing AI does not automatically convert tacit knowledge into organizational capability. The important choices concern what knowledge to capture, where to apply it, and which quality standards should govern its use.
Turn Individual Expertise into Organizational Delivery Capacity
Consider a maintenance services company. This is an illustrative example.
Assessments previously handled only by experienced specialists might become more accessible to other employees through approved records and relevant historical cases.
With appropriate supervision, specialists could focus on more difficult cases while the organization expands the work it can handle. If customers recognize additional value, the company might also explore ongoing assessment or operational support services.
This connects knowledge sharing, delivery capacity, and potential new revenue.
Each step still requires validation: the reliability of assessments, the scope of responsibility, customer demand, pricing, and operating costs.
Define Management’s Role Through Human-on-the-Loop
As AI performs parts of analysis and execution, management must clarify what people decide.
In VURA’s Human-on-the-Loop Management approach, people define objectives, value criteria, authority, and evaluation methods while supervising systems of work that include AI.
Key management questions include:
What should the system optimize?
Which activities can be delegated to AI?
What requires human approval?
Which signals should trigger intervention?
Who remains accountable for the outcome?
The design should include individual human review where the activity’s risks and customer impact require it.
Human-on-the-Loop turns attention toward the design and supervision of the overall operating system, with clear responsibilities for the people within it.
Evaluate AI Through the Capabilities It Creates
An AI initiative should be assessed through time savings and the capabilities the company develops.
Can it serve more customers? Has dependence on individual specialists decreased? Can it expand delivery while maintaining quality? Has it established a service for which customers will pay?
Connect these changes with revenue, gross profit, quality, customer retention, and operating costs.
VURA brings Brain Capital and Human-on-the-Loop together through Enterprise Redefinition. We approach AI transformation as a change in the business, organization, and management system.
The starting question is:
What knowledge and judgment within this company would be difficult for others to reproduce—and what future customer value could it create?
Comments