The Tech Services Reinvention Cycle: AI Transformation and the Growth–Liquidity Trade-Off Ft. Jeff Rich, Sunstone Partners

About this episode

The episode discusses the impact of AI transformation on the tech services industry, focusing on growth, margins, and the challenges of commoditization.

The tech services industry is being forced into a reset. AI is changing how work gets done, how it is priced, and how value is measured. For private equity investors and tech services leaders, the impact is already visible. Delivery is getting automated, costs are coming down, and revenue models built on billable hours are under pressure. So the real question is: how do you create and capture value when execution itself is being commoditized? In this episode of the Zinnov Podcast, Jeff Rich, Operating Partner at Sunstone Partners, joins Sidhant Rastogi, President at Zinnov, to break down how the AI transformation of tech services is reshaping growth, margins, and exit outcomes. Jeff brings a rare operator + investor perspective, having helped scale a tech services company into a multi-billion-dollar business. He now works closely with portfolio companies across cloud, data engineering, and AI services. In this conversation, we cover why outcome-based pricing is still hard to implement in tech services, how AI agents and agentic architectures are changing enterprise workflows, and why vertical and workflow-level expertise is becoming critical. We also explore the reality of…

People in this episode

Host: Sidhant Rastogi

Guest: Jeff Rich

Topics covered

• AI transformation
• tech services
• growth and liquidity
• value creation
• outcome-based pricing
• enterprise workflows
• commoditization

Keywords

• AI transformation
• tech services
• growth
• liquidity
• outcome-based pricing
• commoditization
• revenue models
• enterprise workflows
• valuation
• exit timing

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Sunstone Partners, Zinnov, AI, cloud, data engineering, tech services

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