NearForm sent me their CVC partnership deck. They asked for feedback. This is that feedback, written up properly — because the conversation is worth having in the open.

The deck is good in places. The Waimakers engagement model is well-structured. The case studies are strong. An Post’s AML agent, Kingspan’s satellite imagery pipeline, the junior banker retrieval story — these are real outcomes and they land. NearForm has done genuine work and it shows.

But the deck has a problem, and it’s a structural one. Four offerings presented as a menu. No target state. No “here’s what a company looks like when it’s won on AI.” Without that, a PE sponsor reads a services catalogue, not a transformation story. The combined value is undersold.

The Missing Slide

Every pitch of this type needs a picture of what done looks like.

Done looks like this: every employee has a governed AI workspace — sovereign, company-branded, running on the company’s own infrastructure. It knows the company’s systems. When a salesperson uses it to draft an RFP, the institutional knowledge that went into that draft stays in the company, versioned and owned. When an operations analyst builds a workflow to automate invoice processing, that workflow becomes a company asset their colleagues can use tomorrow. When a developer creates an agent to triage support tickets, it runs under the same identity and permissions framework as a human employee — every action logged, every decision explainable, every escalation governed.

The everyday employee in a winning company is self-amplifying. They’re reaching for AI tools for everything — research, drafting, analysis, workflow automation — and doing it in an environment that incidentally compounds the organisation’s AI knowledge, resilience, and capability. They’re not using ChatGPT on their phones. They’re using something the company owns, that gets better as they use it, and that nobody can switch off.

This isn’t a vision statement. It’s an architecture. Jentic is building it, layer by layer.

The four NearForm offerings are not a menu. They are four of the five stages on the journey to this destination. Reframe them that way and the deck becomes a transformation story.

On “AI-Native”

NearForm uses the phrase throughout. They mean AI-first, which is a different thing — and honest. Twelve months of internal transformation experience is early. That’s actually the more compelling story: “we’ve been through what you’re about to go through, here’s what we learned.” The current framing risks sounding like marketing to a sceptical CTO who’s heard this from every consultancy for the past two years.

Jentic’s claim to AI-native is structural, not calendar-based. The platform was designed from the ground up for an agentic world: model-agnostic at the core, API-first by design, governance and identity as first principles rather than afterthoughts. There was no legacy architecture to retrofit. That’s what authentic AI-nativeness means — not twelve months of internal use, but a product built from a blank page in 2024 when the agentic paradigm was already clear.

The Governance Problem Is the Real Blocker

The deck gestures at governance. It doesn’t solve it.

Here’s the problem that is actually preventing AI from reaching production in enterprise: nobody can answer the question “who gets fired if this goes wrong?” AI that can’t be audited, can’t be tested safely, can’t be constrained to approved workflows — that AI never clears legal. It never clears procurement. It sits in a demo environment forever. This is why ~95% of enterprise AI pilots never reach production (MIT). Not because the models aren’t good enough. Because the accountability question never gets answered.

NearForm’s deck assumes governance is the client’s problem. It shouldn’t. The delivery model needs to ship governance as an output.

That means three things:

A sandbox environment. Agents should be developed and tested in a mirror of production before they touch real systems. Every workflow that gets promoted to production should have passed through an approval gate. This is how software has been shipped safely for decades — AI is not an exception. The sandbox is what allows teams to move at AI speed without accumulating production risk.

Audit trails by default. Every agent action, logged. Not because you expect something to go wrong, but because when something does go wrong (and it will), you need to know what happened and why. This is also how governance teams become enablers rather than blockers — give them visibility and they’ll approve the rollout.

Policy enforcement at the platform level. Compliance controls defined once, enforced everywhere, for every agent, without requiring each team to re-implement them. This is what makes AI governance scale. This is what makes the transition from pilot to production a process rather than a negotiation.

Jentic One is this layer. It’s shipped. The answer to “who gets fired if this goes wrong” is: nobody, because everything is logged, tested, and governed before it runs.

The Senior-Only Model Has a Scalability Problem

NearForm’s embedding model leads with “senior only, small team” as a differentiator. I understand the instinct. But PE firms should be asking: what happens after the engagement?

If value only flows when two senior NearForm engineers are embedded, the client has a dependency problem. PE sponsors need to know they can scale this — hire teams, retain cohorts, pick it up internally. The champions model (Waimakers’ Install phase) is better thinking: train 12 people across the organisation, each ships a working tool, the cohort leaves a pattern library. That’s transferable capability, not a retained services dependency.

The optimal delivery team is not senior-only. It’s a blend. Experienced engineers bring pattern recognition and scar tissue. People who’ve never done things the old way bring no bad habits, full AI-native instincts, and often extraordinary drive. The best AI delivery teams I’ve seen combine both. The senior-only framing is a cost model dressed up as a quality argument.

What Jentic Brings to the Partnership (Concretely)

The platform that makes the playbook stick. When the Waimakers champions cohort wraps up, what’s the artefact? Skills and agents built on what, running where, governed how? Without a platform, you’ve trained 12 champions who built things in ChatGPT Enterprise — and the institutional value flows upstream to OpenAI, not the client. With Jentic, the cohort output is deployed onto infrastructure the company owns: identity, audit trail, policy enforcement, a home that isn’t rented from an AI lab.

The fifth stage — and the reframe. NearForm has four offerings. The missing one is the agentic OS deployment: the employee-facing workspace that is the target state. Jentic is building this now. It’s the layer above the governance infrastructure — the interface that makes every knowledge worker an AI builder, the environment where institutional knowledge compounds rather than evaporates. When this ships, NearForm’s four offerings become the path to it, and the pitch becomes a journey with a destination.

AI-readiness data that a PE firm can actually use. Jentic’s AIR scorecard generates consistent, comparable intelligence: API discoverability, governance readiness, workforce adoption velocity, legacy dependency exposure, partner/supplier API surface. Scored on the same dimensions across every portfolio company. PE firms can track AI maturity as a portfolio metric, not just an anecdote from each portco’s management team. That’s a capability no consulting firm currently offers, and it’s a genuine differentiator for CVC.

On the Deck Itself

Tighten the copy. Spelling and grammar issues throughout undercut credibility in a PE context where every word is scrutinised. The executive summary needs one clear claim, one picture of the target state, one proof point. Right now it reads like four bullet points that could describe any AI consultancy.

The case studies are the strongest material in the deck. Lead with outcomes, not methodology. PE sponsors want to see what changed in the business — not how many weeks the engagement ran.

The partnership opportunity here is real. NearForm brings twelve months of genuine transformation experience, a structured engagement methodology, and a delivery model that’s already working with PE portfolios. Jentic brings the platform, the governance layer, and the architectural vision of what the target state actually looks like.

Neither of us needs to compete with the other. NearForm delivers the journey. Jentic provides the destination — and the infrastructure that makes every step of the journey auditable, scalable, and owned by the client.

That’s the pitch.