I’ve spent the last 15+ years building ventures, leading product teams, and investing in private equity (early-stage) companies. I’ve sat across the table from Fortune executives, start-up founders, helped startups raise rounds as a VC fellow, and co-founded a company of my own. Through all of it, one thing has become painfully clear to me:

The companies that will define the next era of American business aren’t the ones making headlines. They’re the 200,000 mid-market firms generating over $10 trillion in annual revenue—and most of them are flying blind on AI.

That’s why my partners and I built AWSM LABS. And that’s why we’re building KNTRL.

Let’s talk about the elephant in every boardroom

AI spend is going up. Dramatically. But value? That’s a different story. Only about 30% of AI initiatives actually deliver meaningful business results at scale. Over 60% of organizations can’t even move their AI pilots into production. And here’s the kicker—mid-market companies, the ones investing 0.5–2% of revenue into AI, are doing so with almost no systematic way to track what they’re actually getting back.

I see this constantly. A PE operating partner calls us because three of their portfolio companies bought AI tools last quarter and nobody can tell them whether it’s working. A CFO at a $200M healthcare services company is fielding vendor pitches weekly but has no framework to evaluate them against each other—or against doing nothing. A COO at a financial services firm knows they need AI but literally cannot find the senior talent to make it happen.

The pattern is the same everywhere: confusion, hesitation, anxiety, overwhelm, and skepticism. That’s not a technology problem. That’s an operating system problem.

What we’re building—and why it’s different

AWSM LABS is an applied AI consultancy made up of senior operators from places like BCG, McKinsey, JPMorgan, Frog Design, and Morgan Stanley. We didn’t start this to give advice. We started it to execute—and to build the infrastructure that makes AI value creation repeatable.

Our core product is called KNTRL (”control”), and it’s designed to be the AI Activation Operating System for the mid-market. Think of it as three layers working together:

KNTRL / SPRK (”sparks”) — An AI roadmap design engagement. We capture a company’s “value context,” map AI opportunities across their workflows, and deliver a prioritized, ROI-focused activation plan. It’s how we get in the door—and it comes with a 3x ROI guarantee.

KNTRL / CRFT (”craft”) — On-demand AI implementation pods. Not staff augmentation. Not a retainer. Time-bound, coordinated teams of senior specialists who deploy AI solutions in production. Pod model, not project model—because mid-market companies don’t have 18 months to wait.

KNTRL (the platform) — The intelligence layer. A natural-language-driven operating system that tracks AI spend, adoption, performance, and ROI across the enterprise. Financial ROI. Operational ROI. Risk and compliance ROI. Employee experience ROI. This is where mid-market executives finally get a single pane of glass into whether their AI bets are paying off.

Why private equity is our launchpad

We made a deliberate decision to go to market through PE firms first. Here’s why: when a mid-market PE operating partner looks across a portfolio of 5–15 companies, they’re seeing the same AI chaos repeated everywhere. Different tools, no measurement, fragmented ownership, wasted spend. They need a standardized way to activate and govern AI across their entire portfolio—not one company at a time.

That’s our sweet spot. One relationship with a PE firm unlocks multiple portfolio companies. One KNTRL deployment becomes a portfolio-wide operating layer. And the market is massive. There are roughly 8,000–12,000 PE-backed mid-market companies in the US in just our target sectors.

Why this matters to me personally

I’ve been on both sides of this equation. As a product leader at Frog Design, I watched Fortune 500 companies pour resources into digital transformation initiatives that took years to show value. As a VC fellow at Alumni Ventures, I saw early-stage AI companies struggle to prove ROI to their own customers. And as a founder myself, I know the brutal math of trying to build something new without the luxury of unlimited runway.

The mid-market is where I believe the most consequential work of the next decade will happen. These are the companies that employ nearly 50 million Americans. They’re the “future Fortune 500.” And right now, most of them are stuck somewhere between AI curiosity and AI paralysis. They have the ambition. They don’t have the capacity, the talent, or the operating system to turn ambition into outcomes.

That’s the gap we’re closing.

Where we’re headed

We’re in the “crawl” phase right now—and I don’t say that to be self-deprecating. I say it because we’re honest about where we are and how far we want to go. We approach the shifting ecosystems with a degree of humility as the students of business we are and outcome-driven operators we have been. We’re landing our first portfolio-wide deals. We’re working with PE firms managing billions in AUM. We’re building assessments for companies ranging from healthcare operators to financial firms to media companies. The pipeline is real.

Our near-term goal is to prove the OS, land ARR, and expand across full portfolios over the next 12–24 months. Longer term, we want to become the default AI governance and tracking layer for mid-market enterprises—and for the AI vendors servicing them. We’re targeting deployment into 1,500 midsize enterprises by 2030.

We’re going to market to get there, and we’re looking for partners and operators who share our conviction that the mid-market is where AI’s real impact story will be written.

If this resonates

If you’re a PE operating partner trying to get your arms around AI across your portfolio—let’s talk.

If you’re a mid-market CFO or COO who’s tired of AI vendors pitching without proving—we built this for you.

If you’re an AI-native company struggling with customer success and retention in the mid-market—we can be your forward-deployed execution layer.

And if you’re just someone who believes, like I do, that the companies making this economy run deserve better tools to navigate the biggest technology shift of our lifetimes—I’d love to hear from you.

Schedule Meeting

Pablo Cruz

Partner, Product & Behavioral AI — AWSM LABS

pablo@awsmlabs.com | awsmlabs.com

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