From using AI to building with it.
“We were already using ChatGPT every day. We just didn’t know what we didn’t know.”
Pophouse Entertainment is one of Europe’s largest music-IP investors. The team was already AI-curious; ChatGPT was in daily use across the firm. What they didn’t have was a framework for turning that into operational leverage. One day with Deployed AI changed the question they were asking.
Already using AI. Not yet AI-native.
Pophouse is not a conventional investment firm. Co-founded in 2014 by ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus and EQT founder Conni Jonsson, the Stockholm-based firm invests across the three rights that make up a modern music catalogue: publishing, recording, and name/image/likeness. Its portfolio includes the catalogues of KISS, Cyndi Lauper, Avicii, Swedish House Mafia, and Tina Turner; its London arm runs ABBA Voyage, the immersive concert experience that has redefined what a music IP can become. Pophouse Fund I closed at €1.2 billion in 2025, one of the largest first-time private equity raises in Europe in a decade.
The team came into the workshop the way most serious teams come into AI in 2026: already using it. ChatGPT was open on most screens. People were drafting in it, researching in it, summarising in it. The firm was AI-literate.
What it wasn’t, yet, was AI-native. There is a difference between a team that uses AI as a personal assistant and a team that builds AI into how the business runs. The first is faster typing. The second is a different company.
That gap, between using and building, is what brought Deployed AI to Stockholm in March 2026.
One day. One room. The AI Native framework.
Pophouse started out with a AI Kickstart workshop with the session following Deployed AI’s AI Native framework, a methodology built on two principles. First: ground every conversation in the company’s real workflows, not abstract examples. Second: move the team’s mindset, not just their toolkit. Poyan Karimi led the session, opening with a single reframe:
Stop asking what AI can help you write. Start asking what AI can do while you sleep.
What followed was a guided walk through the actual workflows of the Pophouse business, deal screening, portfolio monitoring, catalogue intelligence, brand and synch opportunities. Each one taken apart by Deployed AI’s facilitators and reassembled not as a prompt-optimisation problem, but as the starting point for a digital coworker: what would it need to know, do, and deliver if this workflow ran without us touching it every week?
By the afternoon, the conversation had changed shape. The team was no longer talking about prompts. They were sketching workflows.
“Halfway through the day, someone said: ‘wait, we could just build this.’ That was the moment.”
Three shifts by design.
The AI Native framework is built around three shifts. By the end of the day, all three had landed with the Pophouse team.
The mental shift. AI stopped being a chat window and started being infrastructure. Workflows that had felt manual-by-necessity were suddenly candidates for automation. Deployed AI’s facilitators pushed the team away from which prompt is best and toward what could run without us.
The vocabulary. Pophouse developed a shared language, coworkers, workflows, deployments, that let people across functions talk about the same things without translating. That sounds small. It is not. Most AI initiatives stall because nobody in the room agrees on what they are building.
The roadmap. A prioritised list of where to start. Not twenty ideas or a strategy deck but a clear list of workflows the team itself had ranked but ranked through a process Deployed AI designed to surface the highest-leverage starting points first.
From sketches to deployment.
In June 2026, Pophouse will reconvene with Deployed AI in London, this time to move from sketches to deployments. Same framework, applied at the next layer of depth.
For Pophouse, the Stockholm workshop did what most AI conversations don’t. It moved the team from theory to ownership in a single day. Within days, the firm was sketching real deployments, not because they’d been handed answers, but because Deployed AI had given them a framework to find their own.
“We didn’t realise what AI-native actually meant until Deployed walked us through it. Now it’s how we talk about the business.”
That is what an AI Kickstart is all about. Not theory. No training. But a guided shift from AI-curious to AI-native, anchored in the team’s own reality, with a roadmap they can act on the week after.