AI in Private Equity

December 2025

AI Training results

  • £263,000 annual productivity recovered

  • 20x first-year ROI on training

  • +33% increase in time saved using AI

  • 89% would recommend to colleagues

Services delivered

• AI Essentials (bespoke, in-person)

• AI in Action keynote

A mid-market private equity firm

Based in North America with $2.3 billion in assets under management. They deploy approximately $200 million cheques into businesses across fragmented industries – typically consumer, business services and tech companies with persistent demand and low volatility.

The firm runs lean, with investment professionals handling everything from deal sourcing and due diligence through to portfolio monitoring and LP reporting.

The challenge

The team was already using AI tools – ChatGPT, Copilot, various point solutions – but adoption was patchy. Some people had built it into their daily workflow; others had tried it once and bounced off.

More critically, nobody was using AI for the high-value, PE-specific tasks where it could make the biggest difference: analysing portfolio performance data, synthesising LP communications, accelerating due diligence. The team needed structured training that went beyond generic prompting tips and into daily workflows.

Our approach

We delivered in-person, bespoke AI Essentials workshops to 27 team members, followed by a tailored AI in Action keynote for the whole firm. The all-hands keynote demonstrated what's coming next in AI for private equity – including complex application development, model context protocol (MCP) servers and agentic workflows.

The engagement was fully customised: two hours of pre-workshop calls to understand their specific workflows, plus AI Opportunities surveys before and after training to measure impact. Every example and exercise was built around their actual work – from deal sourcing to portfolio monitoring to LP communications.

The results:

Before training, attendees reported saving a median of 7.5 hours per week using AI tools. After training, this jumped to 10 hours per week – a 33% uplift representing 2.5 additional hours saved per person, per week.

Across 27 team members, that translates to £263,000 in annual productivity recovered, and a 20x return on the training investment in year one.

89% of attendees said they would recommend the training to colleagues – and the firm has since expanded the programme to additional teams.

The AI use cases the team have built

The team didn't just learn prompting techniques – they built practical AI tools they now use daily:

Portfolio Company Performance Analyser

Quarterly valuation reviews used to mean hours of spreadsheet work, manually spotting trends across portfolio companies. The team built a custom GPT that ingests their quarterly data and surfaces performance patterns, outliers and red flags automatically. What took half a day now takes fifteen minutes – and catches things human reviewers were missing.

LP Communications Analyser

Limited partners send a lot of correspondence – updates, questions, requests for information. The team built a tool that synthesises shifts in investor narratives, valuations and KPIs across multiple LP documents, helping them spot trends in what their investors care about and tailor their communications accordingly.

Contract Review Assistant

Due diligence means reviewing hundreds of pages of legal documents. Their contract review tool summarises key terms, identifies risks and checks SEC compliance – turning a multi-hour review into a 20-minute first pass that catches the issues worth focusing on.

Industry News Intelligence

The firm tracks news across multiple sectors. Their intelligence tool processes bi-weekly news feeds and flags relevant developments, risks and opportunities – so the team can stay on top of market movements without manually reading dozens of newsletters.

MD&A Generator

Management Discussion & Analysis sections are essential but repetitive. The team's MD&A tool drafts these sections from structured inputs, saving 2-3 hours per month per analyst while maintaining consistency across documents.

Newsletter Content Curator

Internal newsletters require gathering updates from across the portfolio. Their curator automates monthly content gathering – including monitoring portfolio company LinkedIn activity – so producing the newsletter takes an hour instead of a day.

Document Processing Assistant

Even in 2025, some correspondence arrives as scanned paper. Their document assistant reads, extracts and categorises scanned inbound mail, routing it to the right people without manual sorting.