Buy, Build, Deploy: Using M&A to Drive AI Transformation — Prathik Naidu, Long Lake
Acquiring businesses is a novel strategy to deploy AI from the inside rather than outside
“you're building a solution from the outside in, and that makes implementing AI very difficult”
Long Lake founding partner Prathik Naidu argues that the core barrier to enterprise AI is not model quality but organizational complexity — security clearances, legacy systems, ambiguous adoption ownership, and ROI measurement. He frames M&A as an alternative go-to-market strategy that sidesteps the 'outside-in' problem by embedding AI providers directly into target organizations. The transcript is incomplete (cut off mid-argument), limiting full assessment of the thesis.