How much EBITDA can a mid-market company realistically recover with AI?

Public benchmarks bound the opportunity. APQC's process data shows top-quartile accounts-payable teams operating at roughly $2–3 per invoice while bottom-quartile peers exceed $10 — a four-to-fivefold gap that recurs across back-office processes and represents recoverable cost, not theoretical savings. BCG's 2025 research frames the upside from the other direction: its “future-built” AI leaders carry 1.6 times the EBIT margin of laggards. The recoverable amount, in practice, is the distance between a company's current process performance and that demonstrated frontier.

In the SEAS reference model — a $150M-revenue, $18M-EBITDA company at a 12% margin — that distance totals approximately $5.3M per year, or about 3.6 margin points. It is not evenly spread. It concentrates in supply-chain and vendor spend (~$2.5M recoverable of ~$6M identified), administrative and SG&A processes (~$1.8M of ~$4M), and energy and operational overhead (~$1M of ~$2M).

The rigor is in underwriting only the portion you can tie to a baseline and sustain — the bankable subset — rather than the theoretical maximum. A board underwrites a defended number, not an aspiration. Held, $5.3M of recovered EBITDA at a typical exit multiple compounds: in the modeled case it adds meaningful enterprise value and roughly a full additional turn of MOIC at exit, before any multiple re-rating is counted.