Every private equity value creation plan now has an AI line on it. Very few have anyone accountable for delivering it.
Spend time inside technology advisory firms serving sponsors and the pattern is consistent. AI appears in the investment thesis. It appears in the hundred-day plan. It appears in the pitch deck the advisory firm used to win the work. Then the programme reaches the portfolio company and stalls between pilot and scale, and nobody is quite sure whose job it was to stop that happening.
The reason is rarely the model. It is the estate underneath it.
A portfolio company acquired through a carve-out typically arrives with a fragmented application landscape, data spread across systems that were never designed to talk to each other, and a transitional service agreement clock running against all of it. Layering an AI capability onto that before the separation is clean is like fitting a turbocharger to an engine that has not been bolted to the chassis.
The advisory firms that are getting this right treat AI as a downstream consequence of estate work, not a separate workstream. Consolidate the applications first. Establish a single source of truth for the data. Then, and only then, put a model on it. That sequence is unglamorous and it is the difference between a pilot that impresses an operating partner and a capability that shows up in EBITDA at exit.
What this means for hiring
The people sponsors need for this are not AI specialists. They are the technology M&A practitioners who have already done the estate work, on a deal, under a TSA deadline, and who understand where AI fits once the foundations are in place. Advisory firms are now testing AI tool proficiency in interviews for exactly these roles, and the candidates who do well are the ones who can talk about the application landscape first and the model second.
If your value creation plan has AI on it and the person accountable has never separated an application estate, the AI line is a hope rather than a plan. The seat to fill first is the one underneath it.