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The Leveraged Buyout extracted value by compressing cost structures that expertise-intensive firms could not shrink without losing the judgment that held them together. For four decades, that constraint defined the boundary of the firm. Human cognition was the scarce, expensive, irreducible input — and the LBO optimised around it.

You're buying a driver-based business. You're getting a driverless one.

This paper argues that the collapse in the marginal cost of cognition — driven by general-purpose AI — dissolves the constraint that made the LBO work. When judgment becomes abundant and near-free, the Coasean boundary of the firm expands: activities previously contracted out because coordination costs outweighed scale economics snap back inside. We formalise this shift as the Intelligence Buyout (IBO): acquire the asset, rebuild the decision layer, multiply the cash flow. The IBO is not an LBO with AI bolted on. It is its successor.

We map the Coasean boundary shifts across four firm activities, develop a simple pricing model for IBO-eligible assets, and contrast the IBO and LBO on entry multiple, value-creation mechanism, and terminal economics. The framework is tested against India's expertise-intensive services sector — a market priced as if cognition remains scarce, in an economy where it no longer is.

India's nominal GDP must compound at roughly 8.4% a year in US dollar terms to reach $20 trillion by 2046 — about 7% real growth sustained for twenty years, a feat no democracy has achieved.

For the first time anywhere, both levers of the growth equation are being rewired simultaneously.

This paper argues the feat has become arithmetically attainable because both levers of the growth equation are being rewired at once, at median age twenty-eight. Capital markets — running on 13.1 crore unique investors and a ₹29,000 crore monthly SIP bid — raise the investment rate and fund it domestically, a shift marked by the March 2025 crossover in which domestic institutions overtook foreign owners of Indian equities for the first time. Intelligence — AI inserted into the judgment work that dominates India's services economy — closes the 1–1.5 point productivity gap by cutting the capital required per unit of growth.

Drawing on W. Brian Arthur's theory of technology and the transitions of the United States, China, and Japan from the same $4.5 trillion starting line, we show why the demat account is the political technology that makes twenty years of market-friendly policy durable — and we price each percentage point of the outcome.