Ownership is often one of the most meaningful components of compensation in Private Equity-backed businesses. For many employees, their equity stake becomes one of the single largest investments they will ever make, an opportunity to truly participate in the company's success.

That weight deserves to be treated seriously.

Because most participants are engaging with an equity plan for the first time, questions naturally arise around structure, terms, timelines, payments, vesting mechanics, tax considerations, and much more. Equity plans are complex, and legal documents don't always provide clarity for someone without a Master of Laws. Behind every question is a person navigating what may be the biggest financial moment of their life and they deserve a response that reflects that.

At Centi, we are dedicated to making ownership simple. We provide premium service to empower employees, build trust, and bridge the competence gap to drive high participation and better incentivisation. Responsiveness and genuine care are essential to ensuring that every individual has a professional, reassuring experience. Below are some stats from a recent exit closing:

• 186 questions answered within an hour

• 143 threads closed within a day

• 85% of support cases solved directly by Centi

Companies typically average around 90 employee questions related to the equity plan per year. Without Centi, these land directly on C-suite, investment professionals and legal counsel, creating unnecessary friction at times when teams are already operating at full capacity. By running support through our platform, transparency is instant, friction is dramatically reduced, and every participant gets the personal experience they deserve.

So how do we maintain that level of responsiveness and quality at scale?

Empathy at Scale Starts with the Right Infrastructure

Our customer support team is fully in-house, and every team member is managed by an Account Executive with at least three years of experience in private M&A law. This ensures responses are not only fast, but reliable, consistent, and aligned with the fund's directions.

But great people alone aren't enough when volumes spike, particularly around closings, distributions, or new grant roll outs. That's where AI comes in.

Here's how we've built an AI-assisted workflow that keeps empathy at the centre of every interaction:

1. Enriching every conversation with context

When a participant emails in, our platform automatically enriches that message with relevant data. Their ownership details, potential vesting schedule, document history, recent activity, and where they are in their equity journey. By the time a human reads the message, they already have the full picture. Creating a faster path to a genuinely informed, personal response.

2. AI triage and smart assignment

Not every question is the same, and not every question needs the same person. We use AI to triage incoming threads and route them to the right account executive based on topic, complexity, and participant profile. This means participants aren't bounced around, they get to the right person quickly, which matters enormously when the stakes are high.

3. Choosing between auto-reply and human review

This is the step we think hardest about. Based on deterministic rules, our system decides whether a query can be handled with an automated response or whether it should be drafted by AI and reviewed by an account manager before sending.

For straightforward questions, like how to login, where to find certain documents and similar, automation speeds things up without risk. But for anything touching on uncertainty, or nuanced circumstances, a human with the relevant experience reviews the copy before it goes out. We'd rather take an extra twenty minutes than send a response that misses the point.

Getting this balance right is critical. For many participants, this is their biggest ever investment. The last thing they need is to feel like they're talking to a bot when they're trying to understand what their equity is worth.

The Result: Scaling Empathy

By integrating AI into our support workflow thoughtfully, we've been able to handle significantly higher volumes without sacrificing the quality of care our participants deserve. Every thread is logged, structured, and auditable, giving us the data to improve continuously and giving customers full transparency during transactions or reviews.

Participants still get a personal login where they can view ownership details, track vesting schedules, review documents, and respond to new offers or events, all in one place. And when they reach out, they're met with a response that's fast, informed, and genuinely human.

That's what scaling empathy looks like. By using AI to give care more room to breathe.