Dry Powder: The Private Equity Podcast
Most of the conversation around AI seems to be focused on software, technology, and white-collar services. Anuj Ranjan, chief executive officer of Brookfield's Private Equity Group, thinks the greater transformation may be quietly unfolding in heavy-asset industries.
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“If we’re in the fourth industrial revolution, and I truly believe we are, that key word is industrial,” Anuj says.
Brookfield owns and operates everything from office towers and retail complexes to fiber networks to data centers and power plants. Anuj has a clever way of summing it up.
“We like to call it the backbone of the economy,” he says. “It’s often these boring businesses or assets that people don’t pay attention to, they don’t notice, even though they touch every aspect of everyday life.”
He also believes these overlooked businesses might offer some of the most fascinating use cases for AI. The opportunity isn’t necessarily at the frontier of the technology; it’s figuring out how to deploy AI inside of businesses that remain surprisingly under-digitized.
“You would be shocked how many times we buy a business that is a billion dollars of revenue, 250 million dollars of EBITDA, and they’re barely using Excel properly,” Anuj says. “They’ve not installed an ERP. They don’t have a CRM. They don’t have basic software that has been in use for decades. The real bottleneck to AI actually isn’t the technology. It’s the deployment of it in enterprise at scale.”
Today on Dry Powder, I’ll ask Anuj how AI is creating value across the physical economy and what it means for the future of industrial investing.
The Private Equity Podcast
In our podcast series, Bain's Hugh MacArthur interviews leading experts on the trends and opportunities that will redefine the private equity industry.