Buy, then automate: Long Lake's Prathik Naidu on transforming 40 service firms with AI
AI Engineer · youtube · 2026-10-19
AI Engineer interviews Long Lake founding partner Prathik Naidu on their acquire-then-AIify strategy. Core thesis: deploying AI into real businesses is hard — org charts are messy, trust takes decades, and service firms don't scale like software — so instead of selling AI to businesses, Long Lake buys established service companies and transforms them from the inside.
The talk covers why trust and brand beat pure software in services, software vs service economics, the Long Lake model, how they choose acquisition targets, and results drawn from 40 businesses across residential services, architecture, HR and more.
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