An "iPhone moment" for AI: A significant breakthrough

P R E S S R E L E A S E
Stockholm, May 5, 2025

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – BTS Group AB (publ), a leading global consultancy specializing in strategy execution, change, and people development, has agreed to acquire Nexo Pesquisa e Consultoria Ltda., Nexo, a boutique consulting firm headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil.

Nexo has been growing continuously since it was founded in 2017. With revenues of approximately 12 million Brazilian Reales (approx. 2.1 million USD) in 2024, and a highly capable team of 21 members, Nexo has built a strong reputation for delivering transformative projects in strategy, innovation, leadership, and culture.

Nexo collaborates with a great portfolio of clients across sectors such as financial services, consumer goods, and technology, assisting both local and global companies in navigating uncertainty, unlocking creativity, and activating strategy through people. Their work encompasses culture transformation, leadership development, employer value proposition, innovation culture, and vision alignment – supported by proprietary methodologies and frameworks.

BTS currently operates in Brazil servicing both local and multinational clients with a team of 13 employees. By acquiring Nexo, BTS not only increases the Group’s footprint in Brazil but also adds significant capabilities in culture and transformation services. Nexo’s client base has limited overlap with BTS, creating strong growth potential and synergy opportunities.

“Nexo is known for helping leaders and organizations tackle some of the most complex, human-centered challenges with creativity, empathy, and strategic clarity and the Nexo team is loved by their clients,” says Philios Andreou, Deputy CEO of BTS Group and President of the Other Markets Unit. “Their products and services complement and elevate our existing offerings, especially in culture transformation, and we are thrilled to welcome the Nexo team to BTS.”

“We’re excited to join BTS. We’ve long admired BTS’s approach and unique portfolio to support large organizations and leaders in connecting strategy with culture across the organization,” says Andreas Auerbach, co founder of Nexo. “Becoming part of BTS, allows us to scale our impact and bring more value to our clients while staying true to our values and culture,” adds Mariana Lage Andrade, co-founder of Nexo.

Upon completion of the transaction, Nexo’s business and organization will merge with BTS Brazil. Nexo’s founders will assume senior management roles in the joint operation.

The acquisition includes a limited initial cash consideration. Additional purchase price considerations will be paid between 2026 and 2028, provided Nexo meets specific performance targets. A limited portion of any such additional purchase price considerations will be paid in newly issued BTS shares. The transaction is effective immediately.

BTS’s acquisition strategy continues to focus on broadening our service portfolio, expanding our geographic reach, and enhancing our capabilities to support future organic growth in a fragmented market.

For more information, please contact:
Philios Andreou
Deputy CEO
BTS Group AB
philios.andreou@bts.com

Michael Wallin
Head of investor relations
BTS Group AB
michael.wallin@bts.com
+46-8-587 070 02
+46-708-78 80 19

‍

At BTS, we’re constantly challenging ourselves to innovate at speed. And right now, it feels like we’re standing at the edge of something massive. The energy? Electric. The velocity? Unprecedented. For many of us, the current pace feels a lot like the early days of the pandemic: disorienting, high-stakes, and somehow exhilarating. And honestly—it should feel that way.Our teams have been tinkering with AI, specifically LLMs, for the past 2.5 years and it has really been in the last eight months that I can see the profound impact it is going to have for our clients, for our services and our operating model.The opportunity isn’t about the technology. The world has it and it’s getting better by the minute. The issue is people and people’s readiness to adopt it and be re-tooled and re-skilled. It’s about leadership. AI is deeply personal, it’s surgical. In fact, that’s its genius. So, getting full scale adoption of AI, re-tooling everyone in the company by workflow, so that they can invent new services, unlock new customer value, unlock new levels of productivity, even use it for a better life, is the current race.The central question I’ve been wrestling with, alongside our clients and our own teams, is this:

What does AI actually mean for leadership and culture?

And the answer is clearer by the day: AI isn’t just a new toolset. It’s a new mindset. It demands that we rethink how we lead, how we learn, and how we build thriving organizations that can compete, adapt, and grow.

The productivity paradox revisited

Let’s start with the elephant in the boardroom. There’s been a lot of buzz around AI and its promises. But many leaders have quietly wondered: Will any of this actually move the needle?A year ago, we were asking the same thing. We had licenses. We had curiosity. We had early experiments. But the results were modest, a 1% productivity gain here or there. But by April, we were seeing:

• 30–80% productivity gains in software engineering
• 9–12% gains in consulting teams
• 5%-20% improvements in client success and operations

Just as importantly, the innovation unlock and creativity across our platforms due to vibe coding along with new simulation layers, is leading to new value streams for our clients.This isn’t theoretical. It’s not hype. It’s real. The difference? Adoption, ownership, and a shift in how we lead in order to energize the AI innovation within our teams. The challenge now isn’t whether AI creates value. It’s how to unlock and scale that value across teams, geographies, and business units—and do it fast.

Two Superpowers of the Agentic AI Era

In working with leaders across industries, I’ve come to believe in two superpowers (there are more as well) that will unlock the potential of this AI era: Jazz Leadership and a Simulation Culture.

1. Jazz Leadership

Forget the orchestra (although personally I am a big fan.) The successful team cultures that are innovating with AI feel more like jazz.In jazz, there’s no conductor. There’s no fixed sheet music. There are core bars and then musicians make up music on the spot based on each other’s creativity, building off of each other’s trials, riffs and mistakes, build something extraordinary together.This is how experimenting with AI today, in the flow of work, feels like. For each activity across a workflow, how can new AI prompts, agents, and GPTs make it better, codify high performance, drive speed and quality simultaneously? How can we try something totally different and still get the job done? How might we re-invent how we work?That’s how high-performing teams operate in the AI era. The world is moving too fast for command-and-control leadership, a perfect sheet of music with one leader who is interpreting the sheet music and directing. What we need instead is improvisation, trust, shared authorship, courage and a playful spirit because there are just as many fails as breakthroughs.Jazz leadership is about creating the conditions where:

• Ideas can come from anywhere
• People see tinkering and testing as key to survival and AI failures mean your team is at the edge of what’s possible for your services and ways of working
• Leaders say, “I don’t have all the answers, but I’ll go first, with you”
• People feel “I’m behind relative to my peers in the company” and the company sees this as a good sign because the pace of learning with AI means higher chance of success in the new era

At BTS, we recently promoted five new partners who embody this mindset. They weren’t the most traditional leaders. But they were the most generative. They coached others. They experimented and are constantly re-tooling themselves and others. They inspired movement. They are keeping us ahead, keeping our clients ahead and driving our re-invention.Jazz leaders make teams better, not by directing every note—but by setting the stage for breakthroughs. It is similar to the agile movement, similar to how it felt in Covid as companies had to reinvent themselves. It’s entrepreneurial, chaotic and fun.

2. Simulation Culture

The ability to simulate is a super-power in this next agentic, AI era.Simulation has always been part of creating organizational agility, high performance and leadership excellence. But AI and high-performance computing have transformed it into something bigger, faster, and infinitely more powerful. It means that building a simulation culture is within all of our grasp, if we tap its power.Today, companies simulate:

• Strategic alternatives - from market impact all they way to detailed frontline execution
• New business, new markets and operating models
• Major capital deployment e.g. build a digital twin of a factory before breaking ground
• Initiative implementation
• Workflows current and future
• Jobs to assess for talent and critical role readiness
• Customer conversations and sales enablement motions

With a simulation culture, where you regularly engage in scenario planning and expect preparation and practice as a way of working, billions in capital is saved, cross-functional teams are strengthened, high performance gets institutionalized, win rates increase, earnings and cash flow improves.

Where to get started

Below are a few examples of what leading organizations are doing. Consider testing these in your own organization:

• Conversational AI bot platforms used to scale performance expectations and the company’s unique culture.
• Agentic simulations built into tools so people can prepare and practice with 100% perfect context and not a wasted moment.
• Digital twins of the job created so that certifications and hiring decisions are valid.
• Micro-simulations spun up in hours to align 50,000 people to a shift in the market or a new operational practice.

Final Thoughts

• Lead like a jazz musician. Embrace improvisation, courage and shared creativity.
• Build a simulation culture. Because in a world that’s moving this fast, practice isn’t optional—it’s how we win.

This is a brave new world. Not five years from now. Right now.Let’s shape it—together.

When OpenAI launched GPT-5, the reaction was muted. No flashy new tricks or “wow” demo moment. If you stopped there, you might think nothing’s really changed.But the real story is bigger and far more important for leaders. OpenAI didn’t just release an updated model, they triggered a collapse in the cost of top-tier intelligence across the market. That cost shift will accelerate innovation in ways we’re only beginning to imagine, and it’s happening already.It’s important to note that there are two main ways people and companies use GPT-5.

1. Through the ChatGPT app, individuals and teams interact with the AI directly, writing prompts, asking questions, or creating content. It’s plug-and-play, no coding required, and now GPT-5 is the default model even for free users (with some usage caps).
2. Through the API, companies connect GPT-5 to their own systems or products so it can power customer support tools, automate large-scale analysis, or run AI features inside other apps.

The headline here is that OpenAI cut GPT-5’s API price to $1.25 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens numbers that would have seemed impossible not long ago. In simple terms, tokens are chunks of words. A million tokens of input is roughly 750,000 words, which is the equivalent of several full-length books. “Input tokens” are the text you feed into the model, and “output tokens” are the text it generates in response.The new API pricing makes a big difference for large-scale, embedded use cases. Companies can now process massive amounts of data, run more experiments, and serve more customers for a fraction of the cost. Workloads that once felt budget-breaking are now affordable, opening the door to AI innovation at an entirely new scale.Combine this new cost structure with the decision to make GPT-5 the default in ChatGPT, and you have a dual shift: high-powered AI is dramatically cheaper for heavy users and instantly accessible to hundreds of millions of people, including your competitors. Intelligence that once required careful budgeting and scarce expertise is now abundant and that abundance changes the game entirely.

When intelligence gets cheap, the game changes

Just a couple of years ago, AI was expensive and resource-intensive, so leaders had to be selective about where and how they applied it:

• Licensing and compute costs were high: Running large models at scale through an API could cost thousands of dollars a month, even for modest use cases.
• Access was limited: The best models were behind higher subscription tiers or enterprise contracts.
• Specialized expertise was needed: Integrating AI often required dedicated data scientists or engineers, which added cost and slowed speed to value.
• Budget trade-offs were constant: Leaders had to choose a few high-priority projects for AI investment and delay or reject others.

In other words, leaders had to ration AI usage just like any other scarce, expensive resource.In a low-cost world, the constraint shifts from budget to imagination. The central question stops being “Can AI do this?” and becomes “How can we reimagine the way we work if this is possible everywhere?”That’s when innovation accelerates. Experiments that once required hard trade-offs can now be run in parallel, testing ten ideas for the cost of one. AI copilots can quietly monitor, reconcile, and draft decisions in real time, expanding your team’s capacity without adding headcount. Entire archives or research libraries can be parsed in minutes. Intelligence can be embedded into the devices your people already carry, putting expertise within reach at any moment.

Two ways leaders commonly get this wrong

For some, the old assumption still holds: AI feels too expensive or too specialized to deploy widely. Their only exposure has been high-cost pilots, niche specialist teams, or consulting projects where each experiment felt like a big-ticket gamble. That may have been true last year it’s not true today.For others, the issue isn’t what they say, it’s what their strategy reveals. They’ll tell you they know AI is now cheaper and more accessible but they still budget and resource it like a premium feature. It’s reserved for high-priority initiatives or “innovation” workstreams, rather than being built into core workflows and systems.In both cases, the result is the same: they’re underestimating how radically the playing field has changed. Intelligence is now abundant. The gate is no longer money it’s imagination and execution speed. The organizations that win will be those that treat AI not as an experimental add-on, but as infrastructure integrated deeply enough that the question isn’t whether to use AI, but how to keep evolving it as the cost curve continues to drop.Strategies built without this shift in mind risk missing opportunities in a competitive landscape that’s already moving forward. The advantage now belongs to those who experiment, learn, and adapt faster than the cost curve drops.We’d love to help you with your AI strategy: Contact us to get started.

Each business revolution has reshaped not only how businesses operate, but how they organize themselves and empower their people. From the industrial age to the information era, and now into the age of artificial intelligence, technology has always brought with it a reconfiguration of authority, capability, and judgment.

In the 19th century, industrialization centralized work and knowledge. The factory system required hierarchical structures where strategy, information, and decision-making were concentrated at the top. Managers at the apex made tradeoffs for the greater good of the enterprise because they were the only ones with access to the full picture.

Then came the information economy. With it came the distribution of information and a need for more agile, team-based structures. Cross-functional collaboration and customer proximity became competitive necessities. Organizations flattened, experimented with matrix models, and pushed decision-making closer to where problems were being solved. What had once been the purview of a select few, judgment, strategic tradeoffs, and insight became expected competencies for managers and team leads across the enterprise.

Now, AI is changing the game again. But this time, it’s not just about access to data. It’s about access to intelligence.

Generative AI democratizes access not only to information, but to intelligent output. That shifts the burden for humans from producing insights to evaluating them. Judgment, which was long the domain of a few executives, must now become a baseline competency for the many across the organization.

But here’s the paradox: while AI extends our capacity for intelligence, discernment, the human ability to weigh context, values, and consequence, is still best left in the hands of human leaders. As organizations begin to automate early-career work, they may inadvertently erase the very pathways and opportunities by which judgment was built.

Why judgment matters more than ever

Deloitte’s 2023 Human Capital Trends survey found that 85% of leaders believe independent decision-making is more important than ever, but only 26% say they’re ready to support it. That shortfall threatens to neutralize the very productivity gains AI promises.

If employees can’t question, challenge, or contextualize AI’s output, then intelligent tools become dangerous shortcuts. The organization stalls, not from a lack of answers, but from a lack of sense-making.

What organizations must do

To stay competitive, organizations must shift from simply adopting AI to designing AI-aware ways of working:

• Build new learning paths for judgment development. As AI replaces easily systematized tasks, companies must replace lost learning experiences with mentorship, simulations, and intentional development planning.

• Design workflows that require human input. Treat AI as a co-pilot, not an autopilot. Embed review checkpoints and tradeoff discussions. Just as innovation processes have stage gates, so should AI analyses.

• Make judgment measurable. Assess and develop decision-making under ambiguity from entry-level roles onward. Research shows the best learning strategy for this is high-fidelity simulations.

• Start earlier. Leadership development must begin far earlier in career paths, because judgment, not just knowledge, is the new differentiator.

What’s emerging is not just a flatter hierarchy, but a more distributed sense of judgment responsibility. To thrive, organizations must prepare their people not to outthink AI, but to out-judge it.

P R E S S R E L E A S E
Stockholm, May 5, 2025

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – BTS Group AB (publ), a leading global consultancy specializing in strategy execution, change, and people development, has agreed to acquire Nexo Pesquisa e Consultoria Ltda., Nexo, a boutique consulting firm headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil.

Nexo has been growing continuously since it was founded in 2017. With revenues of approximately 12 million Brazilian Reales (approx. 2.1 million USD) in 2024, and a highly capable team of 21 members, Nexo has built a strong reputation for delivering transformative projects in strategy, innovation, leadership, and culture.

Nexo collaborates with a great portfolio of clients across sectors such as financial services, consumer goods, and technology, assisting both local and global companies in navigating uncertainty, unlocking creativity, and activating strategy through people. Their work encompasses culture transformation, leadership development, employer value proposition, innovation culture, and vision alignment – supported by proprietary methodologies and frameworks.

BTS currently operates in Brazil servicing both local and multinational clients with a team of 13 employees. By acquiring Nexo, BTS not only increases the Group’s footprint in Brazil but also adds significant capabilities in culture and transformation services. Nexo’s client base has limited overlap with BTS, creating strong growth potential and synergy opportunities.

“Nexo is known for helping leaders and organizations tackle some of the most complex, human-centered challenges with creativity, empathy, and strategic clarity and the Nexo team is loved by their clients,” says Philios Andreou, Deputy CEO of BTS Group and President of the Other Markets Unit. “Their products and services complement and elevate our existing offerings, especially in culture transformation, and we are thrilled to welcome the Nexo team to BTS.”

“We’re excited to join BTS. We’ve long admired BTS’s approach and unique portfolio to support large organizations and leaders in connecting strategy with culture across the organization,” says Andreas Auerbach, co founder of Nexo. “Becoming part of BTS, allows us to scale our impact and bring more value to our clients while staying true to our values and culture,” adds Mariana Lage Andrade, co-founder of Nexo.

Upon completion of the transaction, Nexo’s business and organization will merge with BTS Brazil. Nexo’s founders will assume senior management roles in the joint operation.

The acquisition includes a limited initial cash consideration. Additional purchase price considerations will be paid between 2026 and 2028, provided Nexo meets specific performance targets. A limited portion of any such additional purchase price considerations will be paid in newly issued BTS shares. The transaction is effective immediately.

BTS’s acquisition strategy continues to focus on broadening our service portfolio, expanding our geographic reach, and enhancing our capabilities to support future organic growth in a fragmented market.

For more information, please contact:
Philios Andreou
Deputy CEO
BTS Group AB
philios.andreou@bts.com

Michael Wallin
Head of investor relations
BTS Group AB
michael.wallin@bts.com
+46-8-587 070 02
+46-708-78 80 19

‍

Work today is too complex for individuals to succeed in isolation. Almost every critical decision, innovation, or transformation depends on teams working effectively together. Leaders rely on their teams to deliver results. Teams, in turn, rely on their leaders to create the conditions where performance is possible. This exchange, what leaders need from their teams, and what teams need from their leaders, sits at the heart of what we call teaming.

When teaming is strong, leaders get what they need from their teams [creativity, resilience, execution] and teams get what they need from leaders [direction, support, and the conditions to thrive]. It’s how strategy becomes action, how uncertainty becomes opportunity, and how businesses stay competitive in a fast-changing world.