The metric that matters most in the age of AI, and how to measure it. Starting a new fiscal year as a State Agency Chief Information Officer (CIO) always came with the same quiet dread. Sometime in the next 12 months, a federal mandate, legislative change, or court decision was going to land on my desk, and my agency was going to have to respond. Fast. The question was never whether it would happen. It was how much it would hurt.
CapTech Research: 86% of Technology Leaders Say Internal Decision-Making Is Slowing AI Progress RICHMOND, Va., September 1, 2026 – New research from CapTech finds that organizations are confident in AI adoption, however, organizational decision-making, governance, and stakeholder alignment are emerging as major barriers to enterprise AI scale.
Across hundreds of IT decision-makers, CapTech's 2026 Executive Research found a consistent pattern: organizations are investing in AI with confidence, but progress often hinges on operating decisions made too late in the AI lifecycle.
As part of the Georgia Department of Community Health’s (DCH) Medicaid Enterprise System Transformation (MEST) initiative, the agency sought to create a modern digital foundation capable of supporting Georgia Medicaid’s evolving ecosystem of providers, trading partners, members, and agency personnel.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is already reshaping how User Experience (UX), User Interface (UI), and visual design teams operate within financial institutions. The most visible change over the next few years will be contraction: as AI absorbs much of the production work that has defined these teams, their size is likely to fall materially — on the order of 40 to 60 percent by 2028. The perhaps more consequential change, however, is what that contraction does to where value sits. As routine production is automated, what remains is judgment, and judgment becomes more important per practitioner even as total headcount declines.
A large, private equity-owned hospitality client with 140+ locations partnered with CapTech to improve conversion and sales of private events through AI-driven automation. Within the private event space, locations receive multiple inbounds a day that either went unanswered or had a delay in response time that resulted in lost booking revenue. With the consistent and structured nature of inbound event inquires, the opportunity for automation and AI is high.
I spent time this week with operators, technologists, and data leaders at Reuters Data-Driven Oil & Gas (DDOG) in Houston. Fitting, given the name, because nearly every conversation came back to data as the dividing line between companies pulling ahead and those falling behind. A few themes stuck with me, and they line up with something I've believed for a long time: technology only matters when it solves a real business problem.
A large, private equity-owned hospitality client with 140+ locations partnered with CapTech to accelerate AI adoption through an incremental, value-driven approach. CapTech helped transition the organization from experimentation to enterprise AI momentum by rapidly proving value while building scalable capabilities.
Within a compressed six-month timeline, CapTech delivered a focused four-week assessment followed by a full modernization effort that stabilized the platform, re-platformed core SaaS investments, enabled global scale, migrated thousands of records, and met the critical product launch timeline.
Private equity and private equity portfolio companies increasingly recognize the potential of AI as a value multiplier to improve operational efficiency, accelerate growth, reduce costs, and scale without adding headcount. Yet many of these companies struggle to move from aspiration to execution in a way that delivers credible and measurable returns.
A private equity-backed global retailer partnered with CapTech to define a multi-year e-commerce and technology strategy to accelerate e-commerce execution across regions and brands. CapTech developed and delivered a practical target state architecture and multi‑year roadmap to standardize core platforms (commerce, identity, product data) while preserving localized levers needed for regional operations and go‑to‑market models.
A private equity-backed hospitality organization partnered with CapTech to better leverage its member data and deliver more personalized, predictive engagement. CapTech implemented an AI-powered solution that enables data-driven insights and recommendations at scale.By combining large-scale behavioral analysis with AI-powered reasoning, staff gained real-time, context-aware insights—enabling them to quickly identify opportunities, prioritize outreach, and deliver more relevant member experiences. This solution helped begin the shift of reactive reporting to proactive, decision-driven engagement at scale.