AI and Operational Intelligence: A Game-Changer for Scaleups
Who doesn’t love scaling a business? It’s the ultimate sign of success: you’ve achieved product-market fit, your customer base is growing, revenue charts are pointing upwards, and you’ve closed the funding round. But the reality is that scaling also brings chaos—especially for teams doing it for the first time. Suddenly, your once-agile startup team is spread across regions and time zones, compliance obligations multiply like rabbits, and every spreadsheet feels like it’s actively conspiring against you. Sound familiar?
By Mariana Hagström, CEO & Founder of Avokaado
Who doesn’t love scaling a business? It’s the ultimate sign of success: you’ve achieved product-market fit, your customer base is growing, revenue charts are pointing upwards, and you’ve closed the funding round. But the reality is that scaling also brings chaos—especially for teams doing it for the first time. Suddenly, your once-agile startup team is spread across regions and time zones, compliance obligations multiply like rabbits, and every spreadsheet feels like it’s actively conspiring against you. Sound familiar?
For scaleups, the challenge is clear: how do you keep operations efficient, compliant, and under control, all while hitting the ambitious targets set by your investors? Hiring new team members is often not a quick fix—it takes months to onboard them, and by then, you may have created three new bottlenecks. The solution lies in the superpower of AI and Operational Intelligence Platforms (OIPs): comprehensive tools that transform manual chaos into streamlined, data-driven operations.
Let’s take a step back. What is a scaleup, really? A scaleup is a company that has moved past the startup phase (still being a startup in most definitions) and is experiencing rapid growth in terms of revenue, customer base, and team size. Typically characterized by:
This is where data-driven operations come in. Think of platforms like Netflix, Facebook or Spotify: they know you better than you know yourself, serving up content and recommendations with scary accuracy. That same principle should apply to your business. No one should know your operations better than you.
So what do data-driven operations enable? It is tackling multiple problems with smart unified processes. Operational Intelligence means everything is connected: your documents with customers, employees and vendors data, workflows, compliance checks, and risk assessments. Need to check the terms of an NDA before a sales call? Done. Want to review price adjustment clauses before renegotiating a deal? Easy. Preparing for legal due diligence? You can spin up a secure data room in minutes. The beauty of it all is that your system works for you, quietly running in the background, keeping your operations aligned and your team stress-free.
But when’s the right time to invest into OIP and start automating?
Actually, there are clear signs, and the best indicator is when the manual system has become a broken blocker, causing stress and drama within the team. If you notice this, you’ve already missed the ideal time—but the next best time to start automating is now.
Here are some good examples of red flags that indicate it’s time to invest in an Operational Intelligence Platform (OIP) before things spiral out of control:
Early-stage scaling your team: During the scaleup phase, new hires join while others leave, often taking critical knowledge about customers, vendors, procurement contracts, and related terms with them. Documents begin to go missing, and no one has the time (or capacity) to actually read them. Acting now can save time, prevent operational gaps, and preserve institutional knowledge. An automated OIP ensures smoother onboarding by embedding this knowledge into structured workflows that remain accessible to everyone.
Entering new markets: Expanding into new markets brings increased compliance and operational complexities. Automation enables you to replicate successful processes from one market to another, with necessary tweaks for regional requirements. An OIP accelerates market entry, reducing setup times from months to days without sacrificing control or compliance.
Transaction volume goes up: Manual systems quickly become growth blockers when transaction volumes increase. Delays in approvals, signing processes, and bottlenecks can slow operations and increase the risk of costly errors. Automation eliminates these barriers, ensuring full transparency and seamless collaboration across teams, keeping pace with your company’s growth.
Excel is getting full of wrong data: Spreadsheets work—until they don’t. As operations scale, errors multiply, and tracking live, transactional data tied to documents and parties becomes a nightmare. An OIP centralizes and tracks data in real time, ensuring accuracy, reducing errors, and enabling proactive decision-making.
Distributed teams and centralized legal: With remote and globally distributed teams, maintaining visibility, accountability, and collaboration becomes critical. A centralized legal team can leverage an OIP to empower sales and revenue teams to manage their processes independently, reducing reliance on legal input for approvals.
Too many point solutions: When teams independently source multiple point solutions, processes become fragmented, operational visibility decreases, and a significant amount of time is wasted manually reconciling data across systems. This is when transitioning to an OIP—a unified, connected platform for all operational data and workflows—becomes essential. An OIP eliminates silos, streamlines processes, and provides a single source of truth for your entire organization.
Scaling doesn’t have to feel like building a plane mid-flight. With AI and Operational Intelligence on your side, you can calm down and actually enjoy the ride.
Ready to learn more? Read more from our blog: AI and Operational Intelligence for Scaleups
Join our seminar at sTARTUpday: “AI and Operational Intelligence for Scaleups” where you can learn how Veriff, Coolbet, Aleph, Starship, and others have scaled their operations.
🗓 Time: 30 January, 12:00–14:45
📍 Location: Seminar Room 3
Who doesn’t love scaling a business? It’s the ultimate sign of success: you’ve achieved product-market fit, your customer base is growing, revenue charts are pointing upwards, and you’ve closed the funding round. But the reality is that scaling also brings chaos—especially for teams doing it for the first time. Suddenly, your once-agile startup team is spread across regions and time zones, compliance obligations multiply like rabbits, and every spreadsheet feels like it’s actively conspiring against you. Sound familiar?
For scaleups, the challenge is clear: how do you keep operations efficient, compliant, and under control, all while hitting the ambitious targets set by your investors? Hiring new team members is often not a quick fix—it takes months to onboard them, and by then, you may have created three new bottlenecks. The solution lies in the superpower of AI and Operational Intelligence Platforms (OIPs): comprehensive tools that transform manual chaos into streamlined, data-driven operations.
Let’s take a step back. What is a scaleup, really? A scaleup is a company that has moved past the startup phase (still being a startup in most definitions) and is experiencing rapid growth in terms of revenue, customer base, and team size. Typically characterized by:
- Team expansion: 50–500 employees.
- Revenue growth: €5M–€50M annual revenue, often doubling year over year.
- Go-to-Market: Expanding operations into new verticals, markets, or geographies.
This is where data-driven operations come in. Think of platforms like Netflix, Facebook or Spotify: they know you better than you know yourself, serving up content and recommendations with scary accuracy. That same principle should apply to your business. No one should know your operations better than you.
So what do data-driven operations enable? It is tackling multiple problems with smart unified processes. Operational Intelligence means everything is connected: your documents with customers, employees and vendors data, workflows, compliance checks, and risk assessments. Need to check the terms of an NDA before a sales call? Done. Want to review price adjustment clauses before renegotiating a deal? Easy. Preparing for legal due diligence? You can spin up a secure data room in minutes. The beauty of it all is that your system works for you, quietly running in the background, keeping your operations aligned and your team stress-free.
But when’s the right time to invest into OIP and start automating?
Actually, there are clear signs, and the best indicator is when the manual system has become a broken blocker, causing stress and drama within the team. If you notice this, you’ve already missed the ideal time—but the next best time to start automating is now.
Here are some good examples of red flags that indicate it’s time to invest in an Operational Intelligence Platform (OIP) before things spiral out of control:
Early-stage scaling your team: During the scaleup phase, new hires join while others leave, often taking critical knowledge about customers, vendors, procurement contracts, and related terms with them. Documents begin to go missing, and no one has the time (or capacity) to actually read them. Acting now can save time, prevent operational gaps, and preserve institutional knowledge. An automated OIP ensures smoother onboarding by embedding this knowledge into structured workflows that remain accessible to everyone.
Entering new markets: Expanding into new markets brings increased compliance and operational complexities. Automation enables you to replicate successful processes from one market to another, with necessary tweaks for regional requirements. An OIP accelerates market entry, reducing setup times from months to days without sacrificing control or compliance.
Transaction volume goes up: Manual systems quickly become growth blockers when transaction volumes increase. Delays in approvals, signing processes, and bottlenecks can slow operations and increase the risk of costly errors. Automation eliminates these barriers, ensuring full transparency and seamless collaboration across teams, keeping pace with your company’s growth.
Excel is getting full of wrong data: Spreadsheets work—until they don’t. As operations scale, errors multiply, and tracking live, transactional data tied to documents and parties becomes a nightmare. An OIP centralizes and tracks data in real time, ensuring accuracy, reducing errors, and enabling proactive decision-making.
Distributed teams and centralized legal: With remote and globally distributed teams, maintaining visibility, accountability, and collaboration becomes critical. A centralized legal team can leverage an OIP to empower sales and revenue teams to manage their processes independently, reducing reliance on legal input for approvals.
Too many point solutions: When teams independently source multiple point solutions, processes become fragmented, operational visibility decreases, and a significant amount of time is wasted manually reconciling data across systems. This is when transitioning to an OIP—a unified, connected platform for all operational data and workflows—becomes essential. An OIP eliminates silos, streamlines processes, and provides a single source of truth for your entire organization.
Scaling doesn’t have to feel like building a plane mid-flight. With AI and Operational Intelligence on your side, you can calm down and actually enjoy the ride.
Ready to learn more? Read more from our blog: AI and Operational Intelligence for Scaleups
Join our seminar at sTARTUpday: “AI and Operational Intelligence for Scaleups” where you can learn how Veriff, Coolbet, Aleph, Starship, and others have scaled their operations.
🗓 Time: 30 January, 12:00–14:45
📍 Location: Seminar Room 3
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