Large Companies Are Setting the Playbook.
Middle Market Companies Can Benefit.

That number isn't coming from a Silicon Valley pitch deck. It's coming from Morgan Stanley's analysis of thousands of public companies. And it is already reshaping how sophisticated buyers evaluate deals, including deals in the middle market.

We recently hosted a session of our Completing the Deal Masterclass focused on one question: what does AI actually have to do with completing a transaction? More than 120 CEOs showed up. The answer surprised a lot of people in the room.

AI is no longer a technology decision you make at some point in the future. It is a valuation conversation happening right now, in active deal processes. Buyers are asking:

• Does AI improve your operating leverage?
• Does it strengthen your forecasting and decision-making?
• Does it create scalable margin expansion?

If you can't answer those questions with confidence, that gap will show up in your multiple, whether you're planning to transact in 2 years or 10.

The Playbook Is the Same. The Scale Is Just Different.

Here's the objection we hear most often from middle market CEOs: "That's great for Walmart. We're not a Fortune 500 company." Fair. But look more carefully at what these companies actually did. They didn't hire an army of data scientists. They identified a costly, recurring operational problem, applied a focused AI tool to it, and measured the outcome in margin terms.

Route optimization. Patient throughput. Customer experience. Demand forecasting. Fraud detection. These are not enterprise-only problems. Every middle market company running between $25M and $500M in revenue has a version of at least one of them. The difference is that these organizations had the discipline to name the problem, build around it, and then tell the story in language that buyers understand.

That's what AI adoption actually looks like at the leadership level. And that's exactly the story your business needs to be able to tell.

Here are 11 examples across industries that belong in every middle market CEO's mental library.

The Big Company Playbooks

What This Means If You're Running a $25M to $500M Business

Each of those examples maps directly to something a middle market business deals with every day. Routing and logistics costs. Patient or customer throughput. Demand forecasting and inventory. Fraud and operational risk. Pricing optimization across locations. Quality control on the production floor.

You don't need Walmart's technology budget to apply Walmart's logic. You need to find the one or two places in your operation where a measurable, repeatable inefficiency is costing you margin, and then build a focused solution around it. The AI tools available to a $50M business today would have been unthinkable five years ago, and the cost of access has dropped dramatically.

The discipline is the same as these large companies: name the problem precisely, apply the right tool, measure the outcome in dollars, and then build a narrative around it. That narrative is what buyers are now asking for.

This Is Why We Built the Masterclass

We are not an AI company. We are an investment bank. But we started seeing something in deal rooms that we couldn't ignore: the CEOs who were winning on valuation were the ones who could speak to AI's role in their business model with clarity and conviction. Not because they had deployed the most technology, but because they had a story.

So we built a session specifically for middle market CEOs who want to understand what AI means for their capital markets story. Not a technology conference. Not a vendor pitch. A focused, one-hour conversation with the people who sit across from buyers every day.

120 CEOs came to the March sessions. We're running it again in April.

Who This Is For

This session is built for CEOs running businesses between roughly $25M and $500M in revenue who are thinking about a liquidity event, a recapitalization, or a strategic transaction at some point in the next several years. You don't need to be using AI today. You don't need a head of AI or a machine learning team.

What you do need is the ability to speak to the topic when it comes up in a deal room. And increasingly, it will. Buyers aren't just asking whether you use AI. They're asking whether AI strengthens the business model. Those are different questions, and most CEOs aren't ready for the second one.

We cover three things in the session: what buyers are actually asking about AI and why it matters to valuation, the practical frameworks for identifying where AI creates margin and defensibility in your specific business, and how to build a narrative that holds up in due diligence.

You'll leave with a clear point of view you can own and defend. That's the whole point.

The Bottom Line

John Deere is a 180-year-old company that makes tractors. They're using AI to cut herbicide costs by two-thirds. UPS drives trucks. They're using AI to eliminate 100 million unnecessary miles per year. Domino's makes pizza. They built one of the most sophisticated AI-driven delivery operations in the world.

None of these are tech companies. And none of the underlying problems they solved, routing efficiency, throughput, quality control, demand forecasting, are problems unique to large companies. If you're running a middle market business, you have a version of every one of them.

The bar isn't to out-tech Walmart. The bar is to walk into a deal room and tell a credible story about where AI strengthens your business, in margin terms. That bar is achievable. The Masterclass is where we show you how to get there.

Want to talk through how this applies to your specific business? Reach out to Liz Schwab directly at [email protected].