PE Firms Build AI For Portcos

Hi, I’m Lily. I created this PE edition of the AI Dispatch for our growing community of 1,200+ private equity leaders and portfolio company operators navigating AI implementation.

This week’s theme: PE firms are building dedicated AI teams for portfolio companies.

Leading PE firms are creating dedicated offices to deploy AI directly into portfolio companies. Hg’s Catalyst embedded 80+ AI engineers into portcos, generating $130 million in EBITDA uplift. Brookfield established an AI office processing 800+ portfolio company use cases. Turn/River portco Tufin cut ticket solution-finding time by 35% using AI.

In this week’s podcast, Vista Equity Partners CEO Robert F. Smith discusses Vista’s disciplined value creation approach across 90 portfolio companies. What connects these firms is a structural shift: PE firms have moved from advising on AI to building it directly for their portfolios.

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What GPs are Whispering About

Hg’s AI Incubator Drives Portco Revenue Growth

Hg launched Hg Catalyst, an incubator that embeds AI engineers, product managers, and designers directly into portfolio companies to augment AI product innovation. The team includes more than 80 specialists deployed across 15+ portcos, where Catalyst generated 40%+ increases in new customer bookings in year one, with 10+ portcos now deriving over 10% of bookings from AI products. Total EBITDA uplift: $130 million. Pairing technical teams with change management support, Catalyst rebuilds processes from scratch rather than layering AI onto legacy systems. GTreasury, former Hg portco, exemplifies the model: Catalyst shipped GSmart AI in 8 weeks, driving 40% bookings growth and generating 40%+ of inbound leads before the company’s $1 billion exit. Lloyd Hilton, head of Hg Catalyst, reports strong customer appetite for AI products, with builds now happening twice as fast as 12 months ago, proving that portcos are creating new revenue streams their customers actively demand. Read more →

Brookfield Establishes AI Value Creation Office for Portcos

Brookfield established an AI value creation office with over 800 portfolio company use cases already flowing through for evaluation and cross-portfolio knowledge sharing. Stewart Upson, managing partner and co-president of Brookfield’s infrastructure group, explained the firm’s buyers rather than builders approach, deploying proven tools for reporting, HR, finance, and call centers rather than building custom systems. Industrial portcos show the strongest early results: Clarios, Brookfield’s battery manufacturing portco, deployed AI-powered sensor platforms on client trucks that reduce idling, fuel consumption, and vehicle wear through real-time data monitoring. The cross-portfolio knowledge-sharing model allows proven implementations to scale rapidly across Brookfield’s diversified holdings. Read more →

SolarWinds (Turn/River) Launches Its New AI Operational Tools

SolarWinds, a Turn/River Capital portfolio company providing IT management software, launched its Autonomous Operational Resilience tour across KubeCon, Microsoft Ignite, and AWS re:Invent to showcase expanded AI capabilities following their October 2025 launch. The company deployed three AI tools across operational workflows: SolarWinds AI Agent for faster incident resolution, AI Root Cause Analysis for data-driven explanations, and AI Dynamic Threshold Alerting to reduce false positives. CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna said the AI-driven portfolio enables teams to operate more efficiently as they modernize IT environments. Read more →

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Portfolio Gold

Every week, we’ll bring you a new, real-world example of how targeted AI deployments within portfolios are solving persistent business challenges.

Tufin Cuts Support Discovery Time 35% with AptEdge AI

Company:

Tufin (Turn/River Capital portco), a global leader in network security policy management serving 2,900+ customers with ~500 employees.

Challenge:

Tufin’s support teams struggled with knowledge scattered across Salesforce, Confluence, Jira, and Slack, forcing engineers to manually search multiple systems for solutions. VP of Global Customer Support Nina Nichols noted: “We have so many different support systems. It takes an engineer a long time to find which one has the solution they need.”

Solution:

Tufin adopted AptEdge’s AI platform to unify support data, generate instant ticket insights, and analyze text, logs, charts, and attachments. The system automatically drafted and updated knowledge articles from resolved cases, cutting manual documentation time. It also surfaced customer sentiment trends, allowing teams to address issues proactively.

Results:

• 35% reduction in time spent finding solutions from internal knowledge sources.

• Faster resolution times leading to higher CSAT scores.

• Scalability without increased costs: handling more cases with existing ~500 employee support resources.

• Auto-updating knowledge base reducing manual documentation burden.

Why This Worked:

Most AI support tools only search text: help articles, tickets, chat logs. But Tufin’s network security support requires analyzing technical diagnostics: charts, graphs, session logs, configuration files. AptEdge’s AI processes these non-text formats, letting engineers search visual data and technical logs like text documentation. This matched how Tufin’s engineers actually work.

Replicability:

High replicability for B2B technical support organizations with fragmented knowledge systems across multiple platforms (CRM, ticketing, documentation, collaboration tools). Most applicable to portfolio companies with 500-2,000 employees where support teams handle complex technical cases requiring multi-source knowledge retrieval.

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Lily’s Recommendation Corner

Vista Equity Partners’ Robert F. Smith on who will benefit from AI

In this episode of the Alt Goes Mainstream, Robert F. Smith, the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Vista Equity Partners, discusses how AI is reshaping enterprise software economics and the critical importance of data sovereignty in AI deployment. Smith shares Vista’s disciplined value creation approach across 90 portfolio companies employing 100,000+ people, explores whether the Rule of 40 may evolve into the Rule of 50, 60, 70 as AI transforms operational efficiency, and reflects on scaling Vista to a $100B platform. Listen/Watch here →

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Lily’s Closing Thoughts

What separates this week from previous ones is that every major firm profiled has created a permanent office to build AI for their portfolios. PE firms used to hire consultancies for AI strategy, and those engagements delivered slide decks. That paradigm has shifted. Hg built Hg Catalyst with 80+ embedded engineers generating $130 million in EBITDA uplift across 15+ deployments. Brookfield created an AI value creation office processing 800+ portco use cases and deploying proven tools. SolarWinds and Tufin, both Turn/River Capital portcos, are actively touring and implementing AI tools that solve operational problems their customers demand.

This is the new PE operating model, and the fanfare around it is well-deserved.

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Industry Events on the Horizon

Women in Private Markets Summit 2025

December 3-4, 2025 | London
The world’s leading investment event for women in alternatives, gathering 800+ fund managers, investors, and thought leaders across private equity, infrastructure, real estate, and private debt. This year’s agenda addresses how AI and technology are transforming the private markets landscape, with sessions exploring AI’s impact on portfolio operations, innovations in fund structures, and how active managers are deploying AI to drive value creation. Featuring 160+ speakers including LPs from CPP Investments, GIC, AustralianSuper, USS, and Mubadala. [Register here →]

SuperReturn GCC 2026: Saudi Arabia

January 26 - 27, 2026 | Riyadh
The GCC’s premier private capital gathering, connecting 1,000+ senior investors including 300+ LPs (Mubadala, PIF, Jada Fund of Funds, KfW Capital) and 600+ GPs (Apollo, CVC Capital Partners, Merak Capital). The event features 80+ speakers covering global market outlooks, sector-deep strategies across private equity, private credit, VC, infrastructure, and real estate, plus LP-led sessions on asset allocation and manager selection. Networking includes roundtable discussions, Family Office breakfast, and LP afternoon tea. Free places available for qualifying LPs. [Register here →]