PE Reaches AI Maturity

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

This week’s theme: systematic and mature AI deployment.

Leading firms are replacing sporadic testing with systematic deployment: PE firms standardizing AI baselines across portfolio lifecycles, Ardian creating cross-portfolio learning networks, Seismic, Permira’s portco, layering three AI tools for compounding productivity gains. Every GP in these examples is wrestling with the same challenge: “How do we deploy AI methodically across our entire portfolio?”

In this dispatch: build-versus-buy frameworks from leading GPs, portfolio-wide learning infrastructure, and Permira’s multi-agent deployment playbook.

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What GPs Are Whispering About

AI Proliferates Through Value Creation

Leading PE firms including Blackstone, Hg, Jolt Capital, and Partners Group deploy AI across three fronts: internal operations, portfolio companies, and investment strategies. Hg’s head of data and AI reports that AI expertise now proliferates through value creation teams as cross-firm efforts, moving beyond isolated AI departments. McKinsey data reveals IT and marketing/sales lead adoption at 36%, followed by service operations at 33%. Portfolio operators can benchmark their AI maturity against these functional deployment priorities and adoption patterns. Read more →

Ardian Builds Cross-Portfolio AI Learning

PE firm Ardian’s GAIA, an AI chatbot, augments human expertise, rather than replacing it, to create portfolio value. Ardian’s Data Science team collaborates directly with investment teams and the Digital Transformation team to help portfolio companies implement AI across their businesses, while creating structured opportunities for portfolio companies to learn from each other and share insights. Portfolio operators benefit from sponsor-led AI implementation support, cross-portfolio learning forums, and access to proven AI strategies. Read more →

PE Raises Bar on Portco’s AI Adoption

PE firms are standardizing AI expectations across portfolio companies, according to Foot Anstey’s November roundtable. Firms now expect baseline productivity tools like MS Copilot or ChatGPT for Teams. Advanced-stage portfolios require data-driven AI agents integrating sales and financial platforms. AI readiness is becoming standard in M&A due diligence. Key trends shaping adoption: agentic AI driving 2025 productivity gains, AI literacy mandates under EU AI Act, and security concerns pushing firms toward integrated platforms. Shadow AI poses a critical risk as well: 71% of employees use unapproved services, creating potential data leaks and security vulnerabilities. So ask your operating partners: does your portfolio meet the new AI standards? 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.

Seismic Scales GTM Productivity 54% with Multi-Agent AI Stack

Company: Seismic (Permira portfolio company), a sales enablement software company serving organizations worldwide.

Challenge: Seismic’s sales reps wasted expensive time creating personalized content and searching fragmented knowledge bases. Content teams struggled updating materials with new specs and branding across languages. Training needed faster onboarding. CBO Toby Carrington noted that prospects require “highly personalized and thoughtful” engagement.

Solution: Seismic deployed a three-part AI stack between Spring 2024 and Fall 2025:

1. Aura Copilot (Spring/Summer 2024): AI assistant integrated into Microsoft 365, Teams, Slack, and browser extensions, delivering content discovery and meeting insights. Features include AI-generated lesson plans, tone refinement, spelling correction, translation, automated tagging, and summarization.

Results:

• 100+ customer pilots launched in first half of FY25

• 40% pilot-to-paid conversion rate

• Leading organizations deployed: GitHub, HP, PayPal, Trellix, LexisNexis

2. ZoomInfo Copilot (May 2024): AI-powered sales intelligence combining first-party CRM data with external buying signals to identify high-intent accounts and suggest optimal timing and targets.

Results:

• 39% of active pipeline attributed to opportunities identified or influenced by AI signals

• 54% increase in seller productivity

• 11.5 hours saved per week per seller

3. Seismic Enablement Cloud™ (Fall 2025): Expanded AI agents that autonomously create on-demand training videos, updating product documentation, building sales materials, role-playing customer interactions with coaching feedback, and auto-generating follow-up activities.

Results:

• On-demand creation of training videos and product documentation

• Rapid branding and messaging consistency updates across all materials

• Net-new customer-specific webpage generation

Why This Worked: Seismic solved three bottlenecks with three purpose-built AI tools now working in one flow. ZoomInfo Copilot addressed the “who and when” of outbound sales with buying signals. Aura Copilot solved the “what and how” by surfacing the right content instantly without context switching. Agentic AI automated the repetitive, time-consuming creation and updating of enablement materials.

Replicability: High replicability for B2B companies with frequent product updates and multilingual operations.

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Lily’s Recommendation Corner

Data, Deals, and Disruption The Real AI Shift in Private Equity with Jamyn Edis

In this episode of the Raw Selection Private Equity Podcast, Jamyn Edis, a digital transformation expert, former VC-backed CEO, and NYU professor, explains the critical mistake of treating data as “plumbing instead of strategy,” emphasizing that successful AI deployment requires productizing, operationalizing, and commercializing solutions with attributable ROI. He shares a portfolio company case study, a fundraising analytics platform for nonprofits, where agentic AI automated workflows that had previously taken weeks, boosting campaign ROI by 30%, reducing customer service costs by 15%, and shrinking software development cycles from three months to two weeks. He argues PE firms need internal AI stacks across people, products, and processes, with future alpha coming from smarter cognition and human judgment rather than cheaper capital. Listen here →

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Lily’s Closing Thoughts

The Seismic story crystallizes this shift to AI maturity: infrastructure advantage doesn’t mean building everything in-house. It means building what creates defensible competitive advantage, and then integrating best-in-class solutions for everything else. Seismic built Aura Copilot for enablement workflows, but bought ZoomInfo for sales intelligence. The competitive advantage Jamin Edis describes, smarter cognition plus human judgment, requires knowing which AI capabilities to build versus which to buy. Ask your board: What should we own?

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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 →]