PE's AI Posture Gets Serious

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

This week’s theme: cautiously optimistic.

Markets move in moods before they move in numbers. And right now, the mood in private equity is best described as cautiously optimistic, a phrase that sounds like a hedge but is actually a posture.

We're seeing it this week in every source: in Hamilton Lane's call that AI is now the single most powerful force shaping capital flows, in Cooley's documentation of sponsors moving from encouraging AI adoption to mandating it, in Rowspace's $50M bet that the firms with the best institutional memory will win, and in Audax's decade of building exactly that.

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What GPs Are Whispering About

Hamilton Lane Flags AI as Private Markets' Top Force

AI has become the single most powerful force shaping capital flows across both public and private markets, with more than half of global venture deal value already tied to AI-related investments as of late 2025, per Hamilton Lane’s 2026 Market Overview. The firm positions private markets as a critical complement to increasingly concentrated public portfolios, offering broader exposure across AI applications, infrastructure, and enabling technologies. On private credit, Hamilton Lane rejects bubble concerns, describing the current cycle as a silver age supported by structural shifts in global lending that show no signs of reversing. The secondaries market is flagged as a near-term opportunity, with supply of available positions currently exceeding buyer capital. Read more →

Cooley Confirms: AI Now Drives PE Value Creation

Cooley’s 2025 Private Equity Year in Review documents a clear shift in how PE firms are treating AI inside portfolio companies: value creation plans now routinely include AI-enabled productivity plays; sponsors are also beginning to mandate AI governance policies across their portfolios, covering data use, IP rights, privacy, and vendor risk management. At the portco level, traditional subscription pricing models are giving way to usage-based and outcome-based structures as AI capabilities don’t map neatly to legacy SaaS frameworks. Meanwhile, software company valuations face growing headwinds as AI competes directly with traditional SaaS offerings, a dynamic Cooley expects to spur near-term deal activity. For PE leaders, the Cooley report signals that AI is no longer a line item in the value creation plan. It is increasingly the plan itself. Read more →

$50M Bet on PE-Native AI

Rowspace emerged from stealth this week with $50M backed by Sequoia and Emergence Capital to address one of private equity’s most persistent operational problems: decades of institutional knowledge scattered across systems that don’t talk to each other. Sequoia’s Alfred Lin frames the investment as a direct bet on vertical AI, arguing that proprietary data layers are where competitive advantage compounds in finance. For GPs, Rowspace surfaces a question worth asking internally: how much of your firm’s judgment is locked in systems that junior analysts can’t access? 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.

Enverus Builds an AI Brain for Energy Operations

Company: Enverus (Hellman & Friedman portco), an energy SaaS and analytics platform serving 8,000+ companies across upstream, midstream, renewables, and power markets.

Problem: Energy professionals were drowning in fragmented data spread across disconnected systems. Decision-making was slow, inconsistent, and heavily dependent on specialized human labor.

Solution: Enverus launched Enverus AI, a purpose-built generative AI platform trained on 25+ years of proprietary energy data, covering 7 million wells, 350 million land records, $1 trillion in M&A data, and $270 billion in annual invoice spend.

Results:

• Compensation plan launches accelerated 10x across key workflows

• Land teams can analyze 50-page leases and handwritten historical documents in seconds via the Enverus AI analyst tool

• Drilling engineers can benchmark performance against peer operators instantly, with ranked outputs and visual analytics

Enverus demonstrates what vertical AI can accomplish when it is built on proprietary, domain-specific data rather than adapted from general-purpose models.

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Lily’s Recommendation Corner

Audax AI Value Creation with Young Lee & Asheesh Gupta

In this episode of The Insightful Investor, Young Lee, Co‑President, and Asheesh Gupta, Managing Director of Strategic Resources at Audax Private Equity, discuss how the $19.5B middle market firm has systematically embedded generative AI into its investment process and across 60+ portfolio companies. Listen here →

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Lily’s Closing Thoughts

Cautious optimism is only useful if the caution is doing the work: if it’s prompting the right questions rather than slowing down the necessary ones. The right questions, based on this week, look something like: Does our institutional knowledge live in systems our next generation of leaders can access? Have we told our portfolio companies not just to use AI, but shown them how we use it ourselves? Are we building the data infrastructure today that will compound in year three, or are we still waiting for a clearer proof of concept?