Illustrative case study · hypothetical example

This is a hypothetical example. It is an illustrative model — not a specific idari client. The company, figures, and outcomes are composed to show how an idari deployment could work and the kind of ROI the model aims for. Any resemblance to a real organization is coincidental.

How a Gulf-headquartered conglomerate could cut $43M from its back office in 18 months.

A third-generation diversified group. Eight businesses. 17,000 employees. One BPO contract that didn't renew. A close cycle cut from 11 days to 4. Here is what we did, and what surprised us.

Engagement

AI Audit + 18-month deployment

Client

Illustrative · Diversified group

Region

Gulf-headquartered · MENA + APAC

Result

$43M annual savings · 11-mo payback

At a glance

Client revenue

~$11B

Annual, group-level

Employees

17,000

Across 12 countries

Businesses

Auto, finance, real estate, +5

Investment

$4.5M

Audit + deployment + transition

Annual savings

$43M

29% back-office reduction

Payback period

11 mo

18-month ROI: 6.2x

FTE impact

187

Redeployed, retired, or transitioned

Headline win

$18M

BPO contract not renewed

01 · The client

A third-generation group, professionalizing.

A diversified family-owned conglomerate with roots going back more than 70 years. Today, the Group's flagship business is one of the largest independent automotive distributors in the region, but over five decades it has expanded into financial services, real estate, energy and water, healthcare, and hospitality — operating in 12 countries with regional HQs in the Gulf, North Africa, and Southeast Asia.

In 2024, a new Group CEO took the role — the first non-family member to hold the position in the Group's history. His mandate, set by the family council and supported by the board, was to professionalize the operating model in preparation for a possible dual listing within five years. One of his first acts was to commission a full review of the Group's central and shared-service functions.

He engaged idari in the spring of 2025.

We knew our cost structure was bloated. We didn't know by how much. And we didn't have a credible framework for thinking about where AI could actually substitute for human work, versus where it was hype. That's what we asked idari to help us understand.

Group Chief Financial Officer

02 · The challenge

Three structural realities of a long-tenured family enterprise.

Fragmentation across business units. Each of the eight businesses had grown its own finance, HR, legal, and IT functions. Three separate ERPs (a legacy SAP, a mid-market Oracle, and NetSuite from a recent acquisition) were in production simultaneously. Five HRIS platforms. Two CRM systems. The Group had attempted a consolidation program three years earlier; it had stalled after 18 months and significant write-offs.

Heavy BPO dependency. Across the Group, three major business process outsourcing contracts accounted for $34M in annual spend. The largest was a $22M contract with a tier-1 Indian provider, covering accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll administration, and shared HR services across five of the eight businesses. The contract had been in place for nine years, with three renewals — and was up for renewal again in 16 months.

Talent strain. Saudization targets combined with intense competition from new domestic banks, fintechs, and government programs offering top-of-market compensation had created a structural difficulty in retaining experienced back-office staff. Turnover in the central finance team had reached 31% in 2024. Two senior controller positions had been vacant for over six months.

$147M

Total back-office spend across the eight businesses

1.34%

Of revenue — vs. APQC median of 0.85%

$53M

Estimated annual gap vs. top-quartile peers

We were paying a premium for fragmentation. Every business had its own way of doing things. We were the slowest, most expensive holding structure in our peer set. We knew it. We just hadn't quantified it.

Head of the Family Office

03 · The audit

Six weeks. Three consultants. 23 interviews.

idari deployed a three-consultant team for a six-week audit. The standard $15K audit pricing was expanded to $50K to cover the additional scope: eight business units, three regional HQs, and 23 stakeholder interviews across two countries.

Corporate functions assessed across all 8 business units

System landscapes mapped and observed

Processes shadowed in real time, end-to-end

Executive and function-leader interviews

What the audit found

The cost stack was concentrated, not diffuse.

Of the $147M total back-office spend, $89M (61%) sat in just three functions — Finance (38%), IT (14%), and Procurement (9%). The remaining six functions split $58M unevenly.

Three functions scored above 65 on composite readiness.

Three functions were high-fit autopilot candidates. Two scored medium (45–60). Four scored below 40 — either not ready or not a good fit. The recommendation focused only on the readiest.

The BPO contract was the largest opportunity — and the largest political risk.

The Indian provider had become embedded in daily operations. Three of the five business CFOs working with the BPO told us, off the record, that they were dissatisfied with quality but had lost the political capital to push for change. The contract renewal in 16 months was the perfect forcing event.

A recent ERP migration had created an unexpected opportunity.

The flagship business had completed an Oracle Fusion migration 19 months before the audit. The system was stable, fully integrated, and underused — which meant agent deployment could begin immediately on that platform, before tackling the more complex legacy estates.

One major risk surfaced unexpectedly.

During the technical audit, the CISO identified a data-residency constraint affecting three of the proposed deployment scenarios. Customer financial data from the consumer finance subsidiary could not leave the Kingdom under the regulator's interpretation of the data sovereignty regulation. This required idari's deployment architecture to include in-region processing for that subsidiary — a configuration we had not previously offered.

The audit surprised us in two ways. First, the savings number was larger than we'd estimated internally. Second, the recommended sequencing was different from what we'd assumed — they told us to start with Finance, not Procurement. The Procurement savings looked larger on paper, but Finance was more deployable. They were right.

Group Chief Financial Officer

04 · The recommendation

Three phases. Eighteen months. One forcing event.

The recommendation was a three-phase deployment, sequenced by composite readiness score and BPO contract expiration timing.

Phase 1 (Months 1–6). Deploy Finance Agent and Procurement Agent at the flagship automotive distribution business, where the Oracle Fusion platform was most mature.

Phase 2 (Months 7–12). Expand Finance Agent to four additional business units. Deploy IT Agent at Group level. Begin Operations Agent at the financial services subsidiary.

Phase 3 (Months 13–18). Deploy People Agent at Group level. Deploy Legal Operations Agent for vendor contract review. Decline BPO contract renewal.

The Group accepted the recommendation with two amendments: they pushed Legal Operations to Year 2 (the General Counsel wanted more time to develop the contract playbook), and they added a Chief of Staff Agent to Phase 1 — initiated by the Group CEO himself, who had become the audit's most enthusiastic sponsor.

05 · Before & After

Six functions. Six structural changes.

Finance & Close

Phase 1 + 2 · Months 1-9

Metric	Before	After (18 mo)
Days to close month-end	11	4
Days to close quarter-end	18	7
Manual journal entries / month	~2,400	~340
Reconciliation auto-match rate	38%	91%
Audit adjustments per year	47	11
Finance team FTE (flagship business)	124	78
Finance cost as % revenue (flagship)	1.18%	0.71%
BPO-handled AP/AR transactions	100% via India	0%

Month-end close shifted from a two-week firefight to a four-day standard run. The Finance Agent validates every journal entry against source documents before posting. The Group dropped the AP/AR BPO at the flagship in Month 9; the remaining business units followed by Month 16. The two long-vacant Controller positions were filled — not by hiring, but because the work changed enough that internal Senior Accountants accepted promotions into them.

Procurement

Phase 1 · Months 1-6

Metric	Before	After (18 mo)
Managed-spend coverage	22% of supplier base	89%
Contract leakage estimate	4.7%	0.8%
Long-tail suppliers actively negotiated	< 50/year	412 in year 1
Contract renewal lead time	Reactive (30 days)	90-day proactive
Procurement team FTE	31	22
Annual savings from renegotiation	$1.2M	$8.4M

The Procurement Agent ran structured renegotiation against 412 suppliers in the lower 80% of spend during the first year — work that had been physically impossible for a 31-person team. Contract leakage dropped from 4.7% to 0.8%. The Procurement team shrank by 9 FTE through attrition, none by layoff. The Head of Procurement was promoted to Chief Supply Officer with a strategic mandate.

IT & Support

Phase 2 · Months 8-12

Metric	Before	After (18 mo)
Open tickets at any moment	~600	~80
Mean time to resolution (Tier 1)	6 hours	4 minutes
First-contact resolution rate	32%	87%
MSP contract value	$9.2M/yr	$2.4M/yr
IT team FTE	89	72
Unused SaaS licenses identified	Unknown	$1.8M recovered

The IT Agent absorbed Tier 1 support workload — password resets, license requests, VPN troubleshooting, access provisioning. The MSP contract was renegotiated to focus only on Tier 2/3 work and infrastructure operations. The IT team did not shrink dramatically; its composition shifted toward engineering and architecture roles. License optimization returned $1.8M in unused-seat reclaims in the first six months alone.

Chief of Staff · CEO Office

Phase 1 · Added by CEO · Months 5-18

Metric	Before	After (18 mo)
CEO time on weekly status synthesis	~4 hours	~20 minutes
Board pack preparation time	11 days	3 days
Meeting agendas drafted in advance	38%	96%
Action items closed on time	51%	89%
Senior unowned escalations / month	8	1

The Chief of Staff Agent became the Group CEO's most-used tool. It produces a Monday-morning brief synthesizing every business unit's status, drafts board packs, prepares agendas, and chases action items across the leadership team. The CEO has cited it publicly as "the single most useful piece of software I have ever deployed." His existing human Chief of Staff was promoted to lead the new Corporate Development function.

Operations · Financial Services

Phase 2 · Months 11-18

Metric	Before	After (18 mo)
Overdue tasks across project tools	~340 at any time	~40
Cross-functional escalation cycle	12 days	2 days
Weekly status report compilation	22 person-hours	< 1 hour
On-time project delivery rate	58%	84%

People & Talent

Phase 3 · Months 13-18

Metric	Before	After (18 mo)
Time-to-hire (median, knowledge roles)	64 days	31 days
Candidate response time	9 days	< 24 hours
Recruiter productivity (hires/year)	4.2	9.8
Policy questions answered same-day	41%	94%
Onboarding completion (30 days)	67%	97%

06 · The roadmap, as delivered

Eighteen months. Three phases. One escalation.

Month 1

Phase 1 begins

Kickoff. Finance Agent deployed at flagship business. Procurement Agent deployed at flagship business.

Month 3

First major win: Finance Agent catches $1.4M of misposted inter-company entries before quarter-end close.

Month 5

Chief of Staff Agent goes live for the Group CEO. Becomes the program's political fuel.

Month 6

Phase 1 readout

All three Phase 1 agents in production. First savings reflected in P&L.

Month 7

Phase 2 begins

Finance Agent expansion: four additional business units onboarded.

Month 8

IT Agent deployed at Group level.

⚠ Data-residency escalation: consumer finance subsidiary pauses deployment for regulator consultation.

Month 9

BPO transition begins at flagship business. Notice of non-renewal served seven months early.

Month 11

Operations Agent deployed at financial services subsidiary.

Month 12

Phase 2 readout

Data-residency resolved with in-region deployment architecture. Consumer finance subsidiary onboarded. Six functions live across six business units.

Month 13

Phase 3 begins

People Agent deployed at Group level.

Month 14

BPO contract formally not renewed. $22M annual run-rate saving begins.

Month 16

Final business units migrated off the BPO.

Month 17

Year 2 expansion scoped — Sales Ops Agent at flagship, Legal Operations Agent at Group level.

Month 18

Program executive readout

Family council briefing. Year 2 program approved.

07 · Financial results

$43M in annual savings. Eleven months to payback.

Annual savings by source ($M)

BPO contract not renewed	$18.0
Procurement renegotiation	$8.4
IT MSP contract renegotiated	$6.8
Finance headcount reduction	$5.8
SaaS license optimization	$1.8
Operations productivity	$1.4
HR productivity	$0.9
Total annual savings	$43.1

Total investment ($M)

AI Audit (custom 6-week scope)	$0.05
idari deployment fees (18 mo)	$2.40
Internal program costs	$0.85
Change management & severance	$1.20
Total investment	$4.50

Payback period

11 mo

From cumulative cost vs. ramped savings

18-month ROI

6.2x

$28M net savings on $4.5M investment

Year 2 run-rate

$43M

Annual savings, full program live

08 · What surprised us

Three things we did not predict.

The CEO Office Agent became the trojan horse.

The audit recommended the Chief of Staff Agent reluctantly, because CEO Office work is judgment-heavy. The Group CEO insisted on it. Within three months, he was using it daily — and his enthusiasm became the political fuel that unblocked every other deployment. When the consumer finance subsidiary's CEO objected to deploying the Finance Agent in his business, the Group CEO simply said: "I've used it for six weeks. I won't run a board without it. You're deploying it." The objection went away.

The BPO transition was harder, not easier, in the short term.

We had assumed BPO substitution was the cleanest wedge — well-documented work, clear handover, defined scope. In practice, the BPO provider had absorbed an enormous amount of undocumented tribal knowledge over nine years. The first three months of agent operation surfaced hundreds of edge cases the BPO had been handling silently. Resolution required a far larger documentation effort than scoped. We added two months to the transition and absorbed the cost on idari's side.

The hardest political fight was not where we expected.

Going in, we predicted the General Counsel and the Heads of Business would resist most heavily. In fact, both groups were supportive. The largest pocket of resistance came from the Group HR function, which feared (correctly) that its strategic remit would shrink if execution work moved to agents. Resolving this required restructuring the People Agent's scope and shifting more strategic work — workforce planning, leadership development — explicitly into the HR team's mandate. The HR team became advocates by Month 8.

09 · In their own words

Four voices. One conviction.

We saved more money than we expected and learned more about our own operation in 18 months than in the previous 18 years. The audit alone paid for itself ten times over before we deployed a single agent.

Group Chief Executive Officer

The credibility of the audit was the foundation. They walked into our boardroom with data we didn't have about our own company. After that, the deployment was a question of execution, not persuasion.

Group Chief Financial Officer

I was the skeptic. I had been through the failed ERP consolidation. I knew what overpromised transformation looked like. What I didn't expect was an engagement model where the consultant was accountable for the outcome — not the slide deck.

CEO, Financial Services Subsidiary

Our BPO had become a relationship, not a service. Replacing it required confronting that we had stopped measuring what we were buying. idari forced that conversation, and the answer was clear once we asked the question.

Group Head of Procurement

10 · What this illustrates

Five things this engagement says about how we work.

The audit creates the engagement.

The $50K audit identified $43M in annual savings — an 860x ROI on the audit fee alone. This is not unusual; the audit is the highest-value piece of work idari delivers, and is priced as a loss-leader for the deployment program that follows.

The substitution is real, not augmentation.

The BPO contract did not renew. Headcount in three functions reduced through attrition. These are not productivity improvements layered on top of existing structure — they are structural cost-out. This is what distinguishes autopilot from copilot.

Sequencing matters more than scope.

The recommendation to start with Finance, not Procurement, looked smaller on paper. It was correct. Procurement savings materialized only because Finance had built credibility first.

The human story has to work.

187 roles were affected. Of those: 75 redeployed into growth roles inside the Group, 65 retired with enhanced packages, and 47 departed voluntarily during natural turnover. No involuntary terminations. This was deliberate. It was also expensive (~$1.2M in transition costs) — and it was the reason every subsequent deployment landed without internal sabotage.

Time-to-value is measured in months, not years.

The first material savings hit the P&L in Month 3. The full run-rate was achieved in Month 14. Programs that promise three-year transformations rarely survive the first leadership change. Programs that deliver in months survive — and compound.

About this case study. This is an anonymized composite based on the type of engagement idari delivers. The client profile, sequencing approach, and methodology described are representative of how we work. Specific client identifying details have been obscured. Outcomes vary based on operating model, system maturity, and execution discipline.

Could a similar program apply to your organization?

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