AI Archives - DVS - Data Vision Services

AI Agents are coming in fast, but what are they? And how are they applicable to your business?

Ciro García Agulló — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 12:45:54 +0000

introduction

AI Agents are the next wave of Artificial Intelligence. Unlike traditional AI tools that wait for user input, these systems take autonomous action

Key use cases for PE’s and PortCo’s include customer retention, customer journey attribution, business intelligence, and workflow automation

While the benefits are compelling, effective deployment demands rigorous oversight and thoughtful governance

What are AI Agents?

AI agents are intelligent systems built on large language models (LLMs) that can operate independently toward defined goals. Instead of simply responding to user prompts, agents:

Plan their own steps to reach a goal

Interact with tools and databases

Take actions like sending emails or pulling reports

Learn from past interactions to improve performance over time

This next step in AI evolution is being actively explored and implemented by leading companies across sectors including private equity, SaaS, and financial services.

What Makes Agents Different from Traditional GenAI?

Most of us are familiar with tools like ChatGPT, which generate text or other forms of content based on user prompts. But AI agents go further:

Autonomous execution: Agents don’t need step-by-step instructions. Set a goal (e.g., “detect churn risk in our CRM”) and the agent determines how to achieve it.
Tool integration: They connect to platforms like Outlook, Slack, HubSpot, and internal databases.
Decision-making: They evaluate options and choose the best course of action.
Continuous learning: They get better over time by processing outcomes and feedback.

Real-World Use Cases in Action

CRM Monitoring and Automated Outreach

Retool and similar platforms are already using agents to monitor CRM data for signs of churn. These systems:

Spot warning signals like inactivity or declined engagement

Flag accounts for review

Automatically send personalised emails or offers to re-engage users

In one case, an AI agent flagged a high-risk account three weeks earlier than a human rep would have.

Customer Journey Automation

AI agents are now playing a growing role in end-to-end customer experience management. Platforms like Beam, Voiceflow, and OneReach.ai are helping businesses automate routine but critical parts of the customer journey:

Instantly respond to common questions (“What’s my policy status?”, “When will my order arrive?”)

Trigger reminders and renewal messages via email or SMS

Collect documents or confirmations automatically

Execute service updates (e.g., changing details, rescheduling appointments)

Seamlessly escalate complex cases to human agents with full context

This type of automation is gaining traction across industries like financial services, e-commerce, and logistics — helping reduce support costs while improving response time and consistency.

Dashboard Copilots

Traditional dashboards are powerful, but require users to dig for insights. Beam AI is pioneering AI agents that:

Accept natural language questions (“Which region had the highest sales drop last quarter?”)

Query live data sources

Return answers with visual context in seconds

This not only speeds up analysis but also puts insights into the hands of more team members.

Competitor Intelligence

In private equity and strategy, staying on top of competitor moves is essential but time-consuming. AI agents like those developed by Dynamiq and Hebbia:

Scan press releases, financial filings, and job boards

Summarise market trends

Alert teams when key competitors make strategic changes

The result? Faster reaction times and more informed investment decisions.

Why This Matters for Private Equity and PortCos

Agentic AI presents a new frontier for operational improvement across the portfolio:

PortCos can cut cost-to-serve by streamlining support, reporting, and analytics

Deal teams can automate early-stage research and target screening

Boards gain faster visibility on key KPIs with less manual effort

The Risks: Not to Be Overlooked

1. Trust

Giving agents the power to act autonomously — especially in customer-facing roles — requires high levels of trust. A misfired email or incorrect decision could damage relationships.

2. Security

Agents often need access to sensitive data and internal tools. Without robust access controls and audit trails, they could introduce new vulnerabilities

3. Oversight

As Anthropic’s Claudius experiment showed, even advanced agents can make irrational or flawed choices. Human-in-the-loop governance remains critical.

Getting Started: Practical Tips

Start small: Pilot agents in internal or low-risk workflows

Monitor outcomes: Evaluate performance before scaling

Keep humans in the loop: Ensure oversight and review

Build safeguards: Use permissions, alerts, and version control

Conclusion: From Buzzword to Business Value

AI agents are already delivering tangible ROI. The key is knowing where they can add value — and deploying them with intention. Companies that move early, with the right controls, will gain an edge in decision-making speed, operational efficiency, and market responsiveness.

At DVS, we work with private equity firms and their PortCos to explore how agentic AI can unlock capacity, improve customer outcomes, and enhance reporting.

Let’s talk about where AI agents could make the biggest difference in your business.

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AI Enrichment Tool: Enabling B2B SaaS Value Creation

Isaac Waby — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 11:05:58 +0000

introduction

Good enrichment data can significantly drive revenue growth for B2B SaaS companies, yet it is often either unavailable or comes at a high cost
At DVS, we have developed an AI-powered enrichment tool that helps you enhance your customer data with valuable attributes such as industry, sub-industry, employee count, and key decision-makers
Interested in seeing how it works? Watch the short demo below, and feel free to contact us if you want to explore value-creation opportunities for your B2B SaaS business!

watch our ai tool demo

why is this important?

Quality enrichment data enables B2B SaaS companies to enhance revenue through the expansion of both existing and new accounts
For instance, this can involve increasing the size of existing accounts with personalised offers that encourage cross-selling and upselling, or scoring and identifying leads based on factors like industry, size, and location
However, quality data is not guaranteed for B2B RevOps and sales teams. In fact, 92% of RevOps teams report that poor data quality hinders their ability to execute their go-to-market strategies
Additionally, current market tools can be expensive, with costs often exceeding $15,000 annually or only covering one-off data sets

how dvs can help you

We’ve built an AI-powered enrichment tool that enables B2B software businesses to create richer, more useful attributes for each customer or prospect —such as industry, sub-industry, headcount, and decision-maker contacts
Our tool is built from publicly available sources, delivered as bespoke datasets tailored to your business, and does not require engineering

This isn’t off-the-shelf aggregator data; it’s targeted enrichment that we also utilise in our strategic analytics work, including lead scoring, retention modelling, pricing, and go-to-market design

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From data to decisions: what sets leading RevOps teams apart

Isaac Waby — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 13:00:12 +0000

INTRODUCTION

RevOps, sitting at the intersection of sales, marketing, customer success, and finance, is evolving fast. As more organisations look to drive growth efficiently, the pressure is on to make better, faster decisions. That depends on clean, connected data and the ability to extract real insight from it.
At DVS, we work with high-growth and private equity-backed businesses to make that happen. We’re an end-to-end RevOps partner. We help define where data and analytics should be deployed to create strategic value, and we build the capabilities to support it—automating data flows, aligning teams, and delivering reporting that drives action.
Last week, we joined a session hosted by the RevOps Co-op: “The Good Enough Data Trap: Hard Truths from the 2025 State of RevOps Report.” It was packed with insight into where teams are getting stuck and what the best are doing differently.

AI IS ENTERING THE REVOPS MAINSTREAM

Around 80% of RevOps teams are experimenting with AI, from predictive analytics to content generation. Generative AI is especially useful for unlocking insights from messy, unstructured data. But adoption and impact remain uneven. The common blockers? A lack of clarity on use cases, weak data foundations, and internal capability gaps.

For CFOs and CEOs, the real question is: are our data and systems actually helping us make faster, sharper commercial decisions – or just adding more noise?

data quality erodes performance

More than 40% of respondents said their data was “good enough,” yet over 70% admitted it was undermining their ability to execute. Whether it’s segmentation, forecasting, or lead routing, small data issues quickly add up. They affect decision-making, slow down teams, and ultimately hold back growth.

This isn’t just a hygiene issue. It’s a performance issue.

the real gap is strategic alignment

One of the most telling stats from the report: 79% of companies with poor data quality don’t have a shared definition of what “good” looks like. Nearly half said leadership lacks visibility into the technical reality.

This isn’t about cleaning up Salesforce or buying another tool. It’s about aligning the business – across finance, sales, marketing, and ops—on what matters, how to measure it, and how to act on it.

Without that, systems become fragmented, reports become inconsistent, and valuable time is wasted reconciling numbers instead of using them.

what leading teams do differently

The high performers aren’t necessarily spending more – they’re getting clearer, faster. They:

Define what “quality” data means in the context of their commercial goals
Align cross-functional teams on shared metrics and systems
Automate low-value manual work to free up time for high-impact tasks
Give leaders access to timely, reliable insight they can act on

How DVS helps

DVS is an end-to-end RevOps partner. We help high-growth and PE-backed businesses turn information into a competitive advantage by combining strategy, systems and delivery.

Strategy consulting. We work with CFOs, CMOs, CROs and their teams to define where data and analytics can drive value. That includes selecting the right KPIs, aligning teams on metrics, and building the roadmap for data-enabled growth.
Building data capabilities. We prepare, clean and automate the data flows that power consistent, scalable reporting across the commercial organisation – from marketing performance through to pipeline, conversion, and retention.
Insight infrastructure. We design and implement tools that turn data into action. Dashboards, forecasts, and decision-support systems that leaders can rely on.
Driving alignment. We help teams build a shared source of truth, with platforms and processes that encourage real collaboration.
AI-powered data enrichment. We’ve developed a proprietary enrichment engine that scrapes publicly available sources – like company websites, LinkedIn, and Wikipedia – to enhance CRM and go-to-market data. That enriched layer gives you a stronger foundation for targeting, segmentation, and predictive modelling, and unlocks more value from both machine learning and generative AI.

If you’re trying to turn data into a real growth lever – not just a reporting layer – we’d love to help.

We’d also be curious to hear how others are thinking about this.

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