A private equity firm should choose AI applications for the workflows its portfolio companies share, such as collections or the monthly close, build each one first at the company where it is worth the most, and move it to each other company where the result is worth more than the license and the work of connecting it to that company's systems.
Bain and StepStone surveyed 103 private equity investment and investor relations professionals from December 2025 to January 2026. In the results, published in March 2026, 39 percent of GPs don't expect AI to have any material financial impact on portfolio companies in 2026, and the outcomes they do report skew toward cost savings and efficiency more than revenue growth. A separate EY survey of private equity general partners, published in July 2026 without a stated sample size, found AI, automation and data infrastructure cited by 76 percent of firms as areas of increased focus for their portfolio companies. The two surveys asked different samples at different times; together they show AI, automation and data at the top of the portfolio agenda while a large minority of GPs expected no material financial result from AI this year.
In an illustrative US example, Bain's 2026 global private equity report estimates that a typical 2015 buyout needed 5 percent annual EBITDA growth to return 2.5 times the invested capital over five years, and that today's deals need something closer to 10 to 12 percent. Bain's midyear report adds that portfolio resources are limited, and active portfolio company counts have roughly doubled over the last decade, and argues that the biggest overall return may come from making the winners even better.
Pick the workflow by counting how many portfolio companies run it and on which systems. Build it first at the company where the result is worth the most in dollars, and put that result on the company's monthly review before moving the application anywhere else. In collections, the logic stays: which overdue invoices get a reminder, when an account goes to a person, and what the CFO sees each week. What changes at each company is the connection to its accounting system, its field names, its payment terms and approval limits, and the people who can approve a write-off.
Take a firm that holds five distribution companies on five different accounting systems. A collections application built where it is worth the most can move to a second company without rebuilding its logic. Connecting it to a different accounting system is still integration work. The move means building that connection and loading the second company's terms and limits. It also means naming its approvers and running the application beside the current process for a month before the old process stops.
Portfolio companies are usually sold in different years, so the company that built an application may be sold while its sister companies still run it. Settle ownership and payment in writing before the first build. The company that pays for the first build owns the code and maintains the shared logic. Each company that takes it after signs a license with that company, at a price two unrelated companies would agree on, covering that upkeep, pays for its own integration work, and runs its own copy in its own environment on its own data. Write the license so it moves with each company when sold: a buyer of the first company takes the code subject to the licenses already granted, and a buyer of any other company takes that company's license with it.
