“This whole new AI world is all great – but I have 50 developers and a 15-person product team. What exactly do I do tomorrow?”

That question comes up again and again in EQT’s portfolio discussions, says Dominik Stein. Dominik is Head of Growth at EQT and was recently my guest on the DEALMACHER podcast.

His vantage point on the AI shift is unusually broad: EQT’s portfolio spans AI natives like Lovable and Harvey, growth companies, and classic buyouts far away from AI. So when a company asks “what do I do tomorrow”, EQT has to have an answer that works across all three. That answer is worth studying – whether you run a company built before the AI wave, or an AI-native company selling into exactly these organizations.

Start with one question: how much time do you have?

Dominik’s framing is unsentimental. The first question is not “are we AI-first?” It is: how much time do we have before the AI natives disrupt us? That single parameter drives everything downstream – how fast you move, how radical you get, how much risk you take.

The answer differs wildly. If you sell traditional website-building software and now compete with Lovable, Dominik gives you twelve to eighteen months before customers build their sites by prompting instead. If you run vertical software for school photographers – an actual EQT portfolio company from Berlin – you have more time, because few AI investments chase that niche. More time, not much time: you still move aggressively, you just sequence differently.

Dominik puts a sharp marker on it: to him, every company founded before 2023 is almost a legacy company – built before ChatGPT, carrying pre-AI processes in its DNA. A 2024 founding gets the new stack for free. Everyone else has to rebuild while running.

Reading is not a plan. Trainers are.

Back to the Monday-morning question. EQT’s answer is not a memo. It is people.

They send in trainers – operators who have done the rebuild themselves in the last twelve months, often in exactly this kind of pre-2023 software company. These trainers take the first two or three teams and convert them to the new way of working: small units, one developer, one product person, a sales overlay for customer input, shipping in two-week sprints. Then those converted teams help convert the next ones.

The principle underneath: a few people teach themselves everything from what they read. Most teams need someone standing next to them who has already made the mistakes.

Then let the peers do the pushing.

The most interesting mechanism is the one Dominik has a name for. EQT runs forums across its portfolio – CFOs with CFOs, CTOs with CTOs. In each round, they pick the two or three companies furthest along on AI and have them present to their peers: this is what I built, this is what it did.

Dominik calls what happens next Reverse Public Shaming. First reaction in the room: why am I not there yet? Second reaction: if they can do it, so can I. Then people pick up the phone, exchange notes, and small networks form across the portfolio.

Note what makes this work. It is not a polished success story carried through the village – it is the company from the Black Forest that had nothing two years ago. A peer, not a poster child.

That proximity is what turns the first reaction into the second. And for AI-native founders selling into enterprises, the same mechanism is your strongest sales asset: one referenceable peer in the buyer’s world beats ten case studies from somewhere else.

Does it work?

Unevenly – and Dominik is honest about that. Some EQT portfolio companies have lifted productivity so far that 30 to 40 percent of capacity was freed up or redeployed, or revenue accelerated sharply through new products. Others struggle. It depends on the industry, and even more on the people and how fast they truly adopt. What has changed everywhere: AI is topic number one in every board meeting.

The transferable part is the structure, not EQT’s resources. Ask the time question honestly. Put someone next to your teams who has done it, instead of circulating articles. And create rooms where the furthest along present to their peers. Pressure from above gets nodding. Pressure from peers gets phone calls.

I spoke with Dominik about all of this – plus Michael Jordan in the Sportradar board and why EQT deployed only 20 percent of its fund in 2021 – in the full DEALMACHER episode.