Investors know that a business is worth more than its balance sheet, but the harder question is whether the organisation actually knows how to unlock the value it already holds.
At our March event at The Connaught, Nick Cunningham-Moorat (Co-Founder of Malue) said something that stayed with the room long after the session closed. It was not a prediction about technology, nor a framework for operational improvement. It was simply:
“The shop floor knows best.”
– Nick Cunningham-Moorat, speaking at the Syndicate Global, March 2026
In a room full of investors, founders and senior leaders, that line landed with the weight of something most people in the room already knew, but had not quite yet articulated. The most valuable intelligence in any organisation rarely sits at the top. It sits with the people closest to execution – and in most businesses, it is going almost entirely to waste.
That is the problem worth examining. It isn’t because it is new, but it is because AI has made it simultaneously more urgent and more solvable than it has ever been.
The Asset Hidden in Plain Sight
The conversation around value creation at board and investor level tends to focus on systems, strategy and capital deployment. Yet the data consistently points elsewhere. McKinsey & Company research has found that human capital represents roughly two-thirds of an individual’s total wealth, with close to half of that value driven by skills developed through real-world experience. Scaled to an organisation, the implication is significant: the majority of value in any business is not sitting in its technology stack or on its balance sheet. It is in the accumulated knowledge, judgement and experience of its people.
The challenge is not that this value does not exist. It is that in most organisations it is unstructured, unmeasured and consequently unused. Frontline teams understand inefficiencies that leadership does not see. They carry knowledge of what actually works, what the customer actually wants, and where the real risks sit. The question Nick put to the room (and the one worth putting to any business you are evaluating) is whether the organisation has built any meaningful system to capture and use it.
Most have not.
AI should be used as an amplifier; not a replacement.
There isn’t really a serious argument against the transformative potential of AI. When we look at McKinsey, it estimates that AI could contribute up to $4.4 trillion annually in productivity gains across corporate use cases. The investment case is well established and the deployment is accelerating.
What is less discussed is why, despite significant investment, a relatively small proportion of organisations report genuine maturity in how they deploy AI. The answer, in most cases, is that AI has been approached as a solution rather than as a tool – and the distinction matters enormously. AI does not create insight. It scales what already exists. If knowledge within an organisation is fragmented, AI scales fragmentation. If it is siloed, AI reinforces silos. The output is only ever as good as the input it is built on.
What Nick’s framing made clear is that when human intelligence is captured effectively first (when the knowledge of the shop floor is structured, documented and made accessible) AI becomes something considerably more powerful than an efficiency tool. It becomes a mechanism to validate, organise and scale human insight at a pace and precision that no manual process could match. The technology is not a competitive advantage, but rather the human knowledge it is built on.
In Nick’s Own Words:
“Industries such as healthcare (amongst others) lose billions in inefficiencies. Waste is visible everyday – to the people doing the work. Small daily inefficiencies, micro-frictions and friction that no national initiatives can see. And yet, the workforce that sees it, is rarely empowered to solve it.”
A More Revealing Question for Investors
For the investors and family offices in the room at The Connaught, Nick’s thinking offers a lens that goes beyond standard due diligence. Financial performance and strategic positioning are necessary starting points. But a more revealing question (and one that is rarely asked directly) is how well the organisation actually harnesses the intelligence already inside it. Old models would usually design from the centre and deploy outwards, but what Nick suggests, is that you capture from the edge – aggregate, distil, reward, repeat.
Businesses that capture frontline insight, translate accumulated experience into repeatable processes, align their people with their systems, and use AI to scale rather than substitute human thinking tend to outperform over time. Not because they have access to better tools, but because they are extracting value from something their competitors are overlooking entirely.
The organisations that struggle with AI adoption, by contrast, tend to share a common characteristic: they are attempting to automate processes that are not yet well understood. They are scaling noise rather than signal. And no amount of investment in technology resolves that problem, because the problem is not technological.
The Quieter Risk
There is also a longer-term consideration that Nick raised and that deserves more attention than it currently receives. As reliance on AI-assisted decision-making increases, emerging research points to a potential erosion of human judgement and independent analytical capability if not managed deliberately. This is not a technology sceptic argument but it is a risk management one.
For long-term investors, this matters. Businesses that become structurally dependent on AI outputs without maintaining the human capability to interrogate and override those outputs are introducing a fragility that does not show up on a quarterly P&L. Speed of execution is not the same as quality of decision-making – and the two can diverge in ways that take time to become visible.
The organisations worth backing are those that understand the difference, and build for both.
Where Value Actually Originates
The conversation around AI in most boardrooms and investment committees is still, predominantly, a conversation about replacement and efficiency. Nick’s perspective at The Connaught reframed it as something more interesting: a conversation about augmentation, about what becomes possible when technology is built on top of properly captured human intelligence rather than deployed in spite of its absence.
“The shop floor knows best” is not a nostalgic sentiment. It is a precise observation about where value originates in any organisation. In an environment where access to AI tools is becoming effectively universal, the businesses that will outperform are not those with the most sophisticated systems. They will be the ones that understand (and have built the structures to unlock) the people already inside them.
That is not a technology problem. It is a leadership one.
Nick Cunningham-Moorat spoke at The Syndicate Global’s March 2026 event at The Connaught, London. The Syndicate Global connects ultra-high-net-worth individuals, family offices, and senior investors through a trusted private community.
For those interested in continuing these conversations alongside founders, investors and family offices operating at the highest level, The Syndicate Global offers a private membership built around insight, access and trusted relationships.