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Business Insider
a day ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Inside Carlyle's AI rollout: Tech chief shares wins, challenges, and cost savings
Lucia Soares is helming Carlyle's AI transformation after years of bringing tech to big companies. She spoke to BI about the firm's AI rollout and how it's already resulting in cost savings. She also spoke about life as a bicoastal executive and what she learned from her immigrant parents. Lucia Soares had been working for Carlyle for four years when the private equity giant's CEO called to ask if she would take on a new role. "I originally focused on using tech to create portfolio value," she told Business Insider, referring to the companies Carlyle controls. "Then, two years ago, our new CEO called me and said, 'Can you please do what you're doing for our portfolio companies but for our own company internally?' Now, Soares — as Carlyle's chief information officer and head of technology transformation — is taking on a new challenge: Bringing artificial intelligence to the investment giant's 2,300 global employees. She spoke with Business Insider about the rollout, including the successes, the pitfalls, and how the company is implementing checks and balances. She explained where the company is already seeing cost savings, for example. She also walked us through her life as a bicoastal tech executive — and how she learned to hustle from a young age, helping her immigrant parents sell plants at the flea market on weekends. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. In my 27 years in technology, I've learned that you can't start with technology itself as the goal. People said that e-commerce is the goal, or that digital is the goal. Now, they say AI is the goal. And actually it's not. Instead, we start with our business goals: we want to grow, create efficiencies, and build a strong tech foundation. AI and other technologies are levers to achieve these goals. Increasing our employees' AI fluency is a strategic priority. They get AI training from the day they start at Carlyle, and are introduced to a wide range of tools they can use. Now, 90% of our employees use tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot. We also have an AI champions' council where early adopters can play around with tools and eventually share best practices. We're using AI to transform our workflows through Project Catalyst, which automates processes. We're also developing custom tools that leverage proprietary data to deliver insights instantly—saving investors from sifting through endless materials. Today, Carlyle's credit investors can assess a company in hours using generative AI, instead of spending weeks on research. How is AI impacting the average worker at Carlyle? Are they required to use the technology? It depends. Some business leaders have made it a requirement to put all investment committee memos in an AI tool for them to review. Others are not so direct about it, but everybody is seeing how it can make their jobs easier and challenging their teams in meetings to talk about the value they are deriving from AI tools. As a firm, we have a return-on-investment strategy, and my team aims to deliver a certain amount of ROI every year. We're not eliminating people's jobs, but we believe that it can help reduce dependency on outside services costs. For example, we can use AI to review legal invoices and catch errors that will reduce our costs. We've seen real savings as a result. How do you balance autonomy with the risks of adoption? I think a lot about that. I worry about kids in school using a tool to write an essay and not being able to think. But you have to wonder how people felt when the calculator came out, and if they thought no one would ever be able to do math on their own again. We never allow AI to make a final decision. There's always a human in the loop, and someone needs to be accountable for the final results. For example, when employees use AI to write a report, we have employees write a final paragraph summarizing the output to ensure they're thinking critically about it. Let's start with success. When investors invest with us, we can at times receive up to 80-page documents with questions about everything from our employees to cybersecurity training. It's very manual. We had one team decide they'd try to use AI to make investor diligence easier. Despite having just one technologist, this team found a solution to automate the process, which we're launching later this year. We seek to empower people to solve things themselves, with embedded technologists across the organization. We experienced more challenges dealing with regulatory restrictions on large language models globally. We learned the hard way that these regulatory hurdles require a lot of evaluation. We're launching solutions, but it's taking longer than expected to deploy. You might think you can go fast with AI, but it doesn't always work that way, especially in today's global climate. Has any single piece of career advice stuck with you over the years, and what is it? Early on, I was advised to always raise my hand for the extra hard assignments. In other words, take a risk and bet on yourself. My parents are immigrants, and I learned work ethic, courage, and audacity from them. But when I entered the workforce, I had impostor syndrome. With blue-collar parents, the office environment was completely different for me. By taking on difficult assignments, I created relationships and visibility and was able to learn and grow more. Tell me about your parents. They are from the Azores Islands in Portugal. They came to the US during the dictatorship years. My dad only went to school up until the age of 10, because his family could not afford to pay for more education. He can add, subtract, and multiply, but was never taught how to divide. He came to the US after serving in the Portuguese Army to give his family a better future. He knew no English. He became a custodian, cleaning schools, and had a side hustle selling house plants at a flea market on the weekends. We all helped cultivate and sell the plants. I learned a lot from my parents. I am bicoastal: I spend one week a month in DC and also time in New York, but I live on the West Coast and work out of our Menlo Park office. On the East coast, I might start my day — work permitting — listening to news podcasts, going for a run, meditating, and eating a healthy breakfast. At home, I start really early in the morning. I don't always get that workout in, but I start with some early calls, and then take a break to drive my daughter to school before heading to the office. When I get to my desk, I write down the day's priorities. I've done this my whole career, and try not to let constant fire drills overtake those priorities. When you're driving transformation, you have to keep strategy at the forefront. What are the most important meetings of your week? The most important meetings are the unplanned ones. For example, I run into a coworker, and we start talking about our kids. Then they bring up a company we should partner with. Or I run into an administrative assistant, and they show me new ways they're using Copilot. I get inspired by solving problems with people in real time. The second most important meetings are the ones where we drive strategy and brainstorm. As technologists, you can fall into the Dilbert category of employees, where you just work through problem resolutions. So I force strategy onto the calendar to ensure we think big and ambitiously about tech transformation.
Business Wire
02-06-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Braze Completes Acquisition of OfferFit
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Braze (Nasdaq: BRZE), the leading customer engagement platform that empowers brands to Be Absolutely Engaging™, today announced the successful completion of its previously announced acquisition of OfferFit, an AI decisioning company. After years of productive partnership as separate companies, Braze and OfferFit are moving quickly to deepen the integration of OfferFit's multi-agent decisioning engine into Braze's Customer Engagement Platform, all while accelerating OfferFit's growth and reach by leveraging Braze's global scale. Supplementing Braze's real-time, cross-channel Customer Engagement Platform with OfferFit's highly customizable modern reinforcement learning engine allows brands to benefit from complementary frontier technologies in automation and machine learning, to transform customer relationships and deliver mutual value to both their consumers and their business. This acquisition builds on Braze's previously announced development of a native AI agent codenamed Project Catalyst, which is designed to help brands personalize and optimize experiences with highly relevant journeys and content at scale, and is available now (in limited beta). 'With the formal introduction of OfferFit by Braze into our already robust product suite, I am thrilled to deliver marketers a full spectrum of machine learning capabilities built with leading edge generative AI and reinforcement learning technology,' said Bill Magnuson, Cofounder and CEO of Braze. 'We're excited to see BrazeAI™ elevate the strategic role of marketers as they leave behind the drudgework of campaign creation and ascend to being a maestro of experience, optimizing each moment of the customer journey to further their brand and business goals by delivering valuable experiences that resonate with their consumers' needs and desires. With the acquisition complete, I look forward to leveraging the complementary skills, products, and services that both Braze and OfferFit bring to the table and am extremely excited to be officially welcoming them to Braze.' 'OfferFit and Braze complement each other perfectly: Companies will be able to use the power of our cutting edge AI decisioning system, tightly integrated into the leading customer engagement platform on the market,' said George Khachatryan, Cofounder and CEO of OfferFit. Learn more about how Braze and OfferFit's complementary products have been successfully driving positive results for their customers, such as Kayo Sports, here. About OfferFit OfferFit's AI Decisioning Engine is a next-generation approach to personalization in CRM marketing. The old ways of personalization use a combination of propensity models, segments, manual A/B tests, and rules. OfferFit by Braze AI decisioning agents make 1:1 decisions on the optimal way to market to each individual customer. OfferFit works with top brands in telecom, energy, retail, travel, streaming video, and financial services, among others. Current customers include Brinks Home, Canadian Tire, Chime, Foxtel Group, LATAM Airlines, MetLife, Pizza Express, Trainline, Wyndham Hotels, and Yelp. OfferFit was founded by Victor Kostyuk and George Khachatryan and is headquartered in Boston with team members around the world. The company was acquired by Braze in Q2 FY 2026. Learn more at About Braze Braze is the leading customer engagement platform that empowers brands to Be Absolutely Engaging.™ Braze allows any marketer to collect and take action on any amount of data from any source, so they can creatively engage with customers in real time, across channels from one platform. From cross-channel messaging and journey orchestration to Al-powered experimentation and optimization, Braze enables companies to build and maintain absolutely engaging relationships with their customers that foster growth and loyalty. The company has been recognized as a 2024 U.S. News & World Report Best Companies to Work For, 2024 Best Small & Medium Workplaces in Europe by Great Place to Work®, 2024 Fortune Best Workplaces for Women™ by Great Place to Work® and was named a Leader by Gartner® in the 2024 Magic Quadrant™ for Multichannel Marketing Hubs and a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q3 2024. Braze is headquartered in New York with 15 offices across AMER, LATAM, EMEA and APAC. Learn more at Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains 'forward-looking statements' within the meaning of the 'safe harbor' provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including but not limited to, statements regarding the expected benefits from acquisition of OfferFit by Braze, and the expected performance and capabilities of its products resulting therefrom. These forward-looking statements are based on the current assumptions, expectations and beliefs of Braze, and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. These risks include, among others, the extent to which we achieve anticipated financial targets; the impact of management and organizational changes on OfferFit's business; the impact on OfferFit employees and our ability to retain key personnel; our effectiveness in integrating the OfferFit platform and operations with our business; and our ability to realize our broader strategic and operating objectives. Further information on potential factors that could affect Braze results are included in Braze's Quarterly Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2025, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on March 31, 2025, and the other public filings of Braze with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the views of Braze only as of the date of this press release, and Braze assumes no obligation, and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.
