Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman

Today, I know priors were joined by Alex Kaufman, the cofounder and CEO of Long Lake Management. Long Lake recently announced their intent to acquire American Express Global Business Travel for $6,300,000,000 in what I believe is the world's first AI take private. They have previously bought around 30 companies, and they transform and optimize them with AI. So we're very excited to have them on board today. Alex, thanks so much for joining us at Enterprise. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me, Ivan. You just announced what I believe and I I could be wrong on this, but I think it may be, the world's first ever AI take private, where you've agreed to acquire AmEx Express Global Business Travel, the world's largest corporate travel platform for 6,300,000,000, which is pretty amazing. And before that, you've already done 30 acquisitions under this premise that you can buy businesses and transform them with AI, what some people are referring to as AI driven roll ups or AI driven, buyouts. And so I it's very exciting to have you here and learn more about your business. You mentioned you have this nexus platform, which helps your employees serve their customers better and automates a lot of their work. Could you give examples of some of the things that that automates or how it helps them in the context of HOA? And I know you're now in four other verticals or three other verticals, and so what you do kind of crosses across the different businesses you're involved with. Yeah. That's right. So we've taken an approach since the beginning of investing very heavily in our horizontal AI platform, which we call NexSys. I'd say roughly 80% of the infrastructure is shared across the verticals, and then there's a lot of work to take it and deploy it into those end markets. And the deployment involves mapping workflows, understanding data sources, cleaning up data sources, integrating with them to make them easier for the models to access. And sort of our next platform sits in between the models on one side and we're model agnostic and the data sources, the skills, the workflows of the business. And so that takes a lot of customization and significant applied AI engineering capabilities, which we've built at Long Lake. So once we can take that platform, we buy a company now or partner with a company now very quickly. You know, in the beginning, it took us over a year with our first acquisitions to actually, you know, find the the real potential of AI, and see it in the in the business outcomes. But now within days of partnering with a company, we can deploy this very quickly and see immediate impact. So you can buy a company, and then within a couple of weeks, you have instant margin lift because the employees of that new acquisition just go on a platform you've already built for similar businesses. Yeah. What we …