To foster experimentation, leaders should stop judging innovative projects individually and instead group them as a single portfolio. This reframes inevitable failures as part of a diversified strategy, similar to a stock portfolio, where the overall return matters, not the performance of any single asset.

To drive portfolio-wide AI adoption, THL facilitates cross-pollination of ideas between companies in different verticals (e.g., healthcare and tech). It also frames initiatives as gamified 'challenges' rather than top-down directives to foster innovation, secure buy-in, and better navigate change management.

The most successful companies deploying AI use a "leadership lab and crowd" model. Leadership provides clear direction, while the entire organization is given access to tools to experiment and discover novel use cases. An internal team then harvests these grassroots ideas for strategic implementation.

The company uses its advisory service, where employees gain deep experience implementing its business frameworks, as a training ground to identify and develop leaders for its future portfolio companies in sectors like insurance and AI.

Apollo mandates that its own teams apply the same rigorous 'clean sheet thinking' it expects from portfolio companies to all internal processes. This involves constantly questioning everything from investment screening to LP reporting, ensuring the firm itself operates with the same innovative intensity it preaches.

Alpine Investors applies the same operational rigor to its own firm as it does to its investments. By running quarterly "Opportunity for Improvement" (OFI) projects, small internal teams tackle challenges or scale successes, creating compounding innovation within the firm itself.

Instead of a top-down AI strategy, Brookfield encourages its 500 portfolio companies to experiment independently. The key is a structured process for sharing all outcomes. A successful application in one business can be rapidly deployed elsewhere, while failures prevent 499 other companies from making the same mistake.

To innovate quickly without being bogged down by technical debt, portfolio companies should ring-fence new AI development. By outsourcing it and treating it as a separate "skunk works" project, the core tech team can focus on existing systems while the new initiative succeeds or fails on its own merits.

Instead of only funding internal innovations, UPMC Enterprises actively sources best-in-class technologies globally and uses its integrated health system to pilot and validate them. This accelerates adoption of cutting-edge solutions and provides a unique value proposition beyond just capital.