How Cortado Group uses AI without handing over judgment
Dan Bernoske is CEO of Cortado Group, a go-to-market execution firm for private equity-backed and founder-led companies. The conversation looks at where AI has expanded the firm’s research, why proposal writing still needs a human touch, and how buyers are arriving better prepared.
Cortado Group uses AI to analyze client and prospect calls at scale, but keeps proposal writing in human hands because context and judgment matter. For the next year, Bernoske advises firms to build a useful content asset and consider AI search discoverability, rather than chase tools or publish generic posts.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
Cortado Group was founded in 2019 to fill a niche: B2B mid-market companies owned by private equity firms. At the time, the only ones serving them on revenue growth and revenue excellence were either small, single-shingle shops or large firms. We recognized that gap in the market, and Cortado was founded to serve it. Cortado was built around a specific gap: PE portfolio companies need revenue growth, but the Big 4 is overbuilt and overpriced for most portcos, and generalist consultants don’t understand the hold-period clock. Our tagline is "You bought the growth story. We make it real." What actually backs that up is mapping every engagement to where a company sits in its hold period: prove the thesis is executable in the first six months, make growth repeatable through the mid-hold, get the story clean before diligence starts. We get in and get out, so clients can get moving.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Today, most new business comes through relationships: PE partner intros, referrals from operators we’ve worked with, prior contacts who know the work firsthand. It works, but it doesn’t scale. When a PE contact is between deals, there’s no reliable way to stay on their radar. Where we’d like to be is generating demand through content and community, not waiting.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
Research synthesis. We built a pipeline that processes every client and prospect call, extracts buyer questions and ideas, and maps relationships across the whole corpus. That used to be manual transcript review. By automating that work, we now conduct deeper, almost endless analysis at scale.
The thing we went back to doing by hand is proposal writing. We tried AI first drafts and kept getting output that was technically reasonable but subtly wrong. It didn’t understand the client’s specific history, the unspoken dynamic with the sponsor, or which part of our model to lead with. Every time we sent one without enough editing, it showed. AI touches the outline now. The actual writing is still us.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Buyers are more research-fluent than they were two years ago. They arrive having already compared options, with sharper questions about how our model differs from a generalist firm or the in-house route. The vocabulary has shifted in ways that suggest people are synthesizing a lot before the first call, not just Googling us.
On the ChatGPT question: nothing definitive yet, but we’re watching it
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Do:
Build one content asset that proves your methodology. A named framework or diagnostic, something a fund partner can forward without explanation. Blog posts do not do that.
Start thinking about AI search discoverability now. When someone asks ChatGPT who to call for a go-to-market build, you want your name to come back.
Ignore:
Cold outreach at volume. The buyers you want have said directly it does not influence them.
Broad social presence without a point of view. One specific take beats 50 generic posts.
Chasing every new AI tool. The constraint is judgment about which process to change, not access to more software.
Thank you to Dan Bernoske and the team at Cortado Group for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
Want to share your playbook?
Leaders Perception publishes founder and operator interviews every week. A few questions, about five minutes, no calls. It is free and everyone we accept gets published.