We've Been Here Before: We've spent decades investing in technology to make equipment finance more efficient.

Origination systems, automated credit decisioning, digital documentation, servicing platforms. Each promised to reduce costs, improve customer experience, and make our businesses more productive.

Yet I keep coming back to the same question.

Have we fundamentally changed how we operate, or have we simply added technology to processes that should have been challenged years ago?

A recent QuickFi analysis of ELFA's 2026 Survey of Equipment Finance Activity reported that small-ticket processing and overhead costs reached $2,729 per booked transaction in 2025, an increase of approximately 14% on a comparable basis. The calculation includes sales and administrative overhead, as well as lower transaction volume contributed to the increase.

Those numbers don't prove our technology investments have failed. But they should raise questions about how we're operating our businesses in 2026.

After more than 25 years of building and leading equipment finance operations, I've seen technology do exactly what it was designed to do while the underlying process made little business sense. We automated unnecessary steps, reviewed information multiple times, and created handoffs that added expense without improving the outcome.

Today AI tools presents another opportunity, however I'm hearing many of the same conversations, same thought leader posts.
Which platform should we buy? What CRM should we use? What can we automate? How quickly can we implement it? 

I believe we're starting in the wrong place. We have to think differently. The playbook has changed. The people best positioned to improve our businesses are already working inside them. They understand where the problems exist, why they happen, and what needs to change.

I've called these people intrapreneurs for years.

And AI is giving them new ways to act on what they know, however, you have to provide them the proper culture in latitude.

Your Intrapreneurs Are Already Inside Your Organization

An intrapreneur brings an entrepreneurial mindset into an established organization. They challenge assumptions, recognize opportunities, and take ownership of making things better.

They aren't necessarily your managers or the people with the biggest titles.

They might be the credit analyst questioning why the same information is reviewed multiple times. The documentation specialist who understands what's delaying funding. Or the servicing employee who recognizes a recurring exception that nobody has addressed.

Throughout my career, I've distinguished between functional and vital employees.

Functional employees consistently execute the processes that keep the business running. Every organization needs them. Vital employees go further.

They understand the inputs and outputs of their work, recognize how their decisions affect other departments, and look for opportunities to improve the business. They influence the people around them.

These are often your intrapreneurs. But having these individuals inside your company doesn't guarantee their ideas will be heard. We hire people for their experience, train them to follow established processes, and then expect them to think differently. How often do we actually involve them in deciding how the business should operate?

That's a leadership decision.

Stakeholder Engagement Is Where Change Begins

One of the biggest mistakes I see when companies introduce new technology is involving the people who understand the work after leadership has already selected the solution. We bring employees into implementation meetings, explain what's changing, and ask for their support.

That's not the stakeholder engagement I'm talking about.

Real engagement means involving the right people in defining the problem before deciding how to solve it. The most important piece of this, has nothing to do with your IT department or your tech provider.

Let’s consider the workflow from credit application through funding.

Sales understand the dealer relationship and customer expectations. Credit understands underwriting and risk. Operations understand documentation and funding. Compliance understands the controls we need to maintain. Customer service understands how the deal should be booked on the system. Accounting understands how the payable and receivable should be set up. Collection understands that good contact information is labeled properly in the system to make easy contact on a past due payment.

Each group understands part of the process. But who is looking at the entire transaction?

Sales might believe credit takes too long. Credit might believe sales submits incomplete applications. Operations might be dealing with exceptions created by both departments. Asset management isn't happy with the description of the assets on the invoice that operations approved. The county isn't happy with the sales tax treatment on the transaction for the ELFA versus a dollar buyout lease. Customer service says that they need a portal for end users, but no one's asked the end users if they'll actually use it. 

Everyone is working hard within their own area of responsibility. Meanwhile, the dealer is waiting, employees are touching the same transaction multiple times, and our operating expenses continue to accumulate.

This is where I would bring those stakeholders together and start challenging the workflow. 

Why are we collecting certain information before we know whether a transaction will be approved? Which verifications are required upfront, and which can wait? Can these decisions run in parallel? Give me leverage automation to run verification/validation checks. Where are decisions getting delayed? What is creating the exceptions that keep coming back?

The biggest understanding of all: there's no more gray area relative to the data when it's being processed. You can't have mistakes from misspelling of company names. You can't incorrectly label a company that's an LLC as Inc. 

Some steps will be necessary for credit, compliance, or risk management. Others may exist simply because that's how we've always operated and no one's owned the workflow or SOP to make the change or recommendations.
We need to understand the difference.
The objective isn't to make one department more efficient at the expense of another. It's to improve the entire process, from the customer's initial request through funding.
And the people performing that work need to help design the solution and then own it. 

AI Gives Intrapreneurs New Capabilities

This is where I believe AI changes the opportunity.

Historically, an employee might recognize a better way to process a transaction but lack the technical skills or resources to demonstrate it. The idea might require an IT project, outside development support, or months of planning before anyone could determine whether it would work. And as a leader, you would have to understand the cost of this endeavor.

Today, many of those same employees can use AI to analyze existing procedures, identify repetitive tasks, evaluate exceptions, and develop preliminary solutions.

Think about an operations employee who understands why documentation packages repeatedly come back for corrections. 64% of transactions come back in, which we call a reloop.

With AI, that employee can help organize the exceptions, identify common causes, compare them against existing procedures, and develop a proposed workflow that addresses the problems earlier. This is true root cause analysis work. 

Maybe the answer is a clearer procedure. Maybe it's changing when information gets collected. Or maybe a portion of the process can be automated. Or using the LLM with the CRIT framework, to get a second opinion on what the workflow could be with the contextual knowledge of the human driving it.

The important point is that the employee doesn't have to start with the technology. 

They start with what they know about the business. Their wisdom, their contextual knowledge, their understanding. Of course, developing an idea and implementing it are two different things. Credit authority, customer information, compliance, and data security still require appropriate oversight. Any proposed change needs testing before it becomes part of the operation. But AI can help employees move from identifying problems to demonstrating potential improvements.

That's a meaningful change for intrapreneurship.

Leadership Determines What Happens Next

I've always believed intrapreneurship starts at the top of the organization. It's not an initiative. It's an operating system, a culture.

Leadership has to demonstrate curiosity, encourage calculated risks, and be willing to challenge established practices. Leadership provides the vision and the alignment to the team in an environment that is consistent with the direction of the organization.

Employees need to understand where the business is headed and what we're trying to accomplish. Otherwise, even good ideas can consume resources without improving performance. Always starting with the highest-leverage outcomes to support the entire business.

There's another part of this conversation I believe leaders need to consider.

Discretionary effort. We're asking employees to go beyond their normal responsibilities, develop ideas, and take ownership of improving the business. There needs to be a shared benefit.

People want opportunities to learn, grow, contribute, and be recognized for making a difference. If the company benefits from their ideas but employees see no opportunity for themselves, that motivation eventually suffers. And when leadership decides to pursue an idea, someone needs to own the outcome. Who is responsible for implementing the change? Who has decision-making authority? What controls must remain in place? How will we know whether the improvement worked?

That last question matters.

An AI tool processing a thousand documents might sound impressive. But if transactions still sit in a funding queue for two days, what have we accomplished? I'd rather know whether we've reduced processing costs, shortened cycle times, eliminated rework, improved the dealer experience, or increased profitability.

Those are business results.

For equipment finance leaders, I would start by identifying the people already challenging how the business operates. Bring them together with the stakeholders who own the work, give them a specific operating problem to solve, and establish accountability for the outcome.

Start with one meaningful workflow. Prove the improvement. Then build on what works.

Don't Let Technology Providers Define Your Competitive Advantage

AI represents one of the greatest opportunities we've ever had to advance intrapreneurship within equipment finance. Yet I'm seeing too many organizations turn to third-party technology providers and consultants to tell them how their businesses should operate.

Here's my concern: Technology providers understand their products. Consultants may understand the industry. But neither understands your business better than the people who operate it every day.

Our competitors will have access to many of the same AI tools and technologies. If we're all adopting the same technology and following the same implementation playbooks, we're creating a race to the middle. Our competitive advantage comes from the collective experience, knowledge, and judgment of the people inside our organizations. But that knowledge only creates value when leadership engages those individuals, challenges existing processes, and gives them the authority to improve how the business operates.

I've spent decades watching companies invest in technology while overlooking the people who understand what actually needs to change. We should be using outside expertise and technology to support our operating strategy, not allowing outsiders to define it.

AI is the tool. Leadership is the strategy. And intrapreneurs are the people who turn that strategy into results.

Learn it, Build it, Leverage it.