An operating partner at a private equity firm should cut each portfolio company's AI pilots by the middle of the hold to the few tied to a named value creation lever, each with one owner and a benefit a buyer's diligence team can rerun.
EY published its Global PE Exit Readiness Study 2026 on 2 June 2026, from survey responses and selected interviews with a cohort of 100 global private equity executives and a separate cohort of 100 executives from recently exited PE-backed portfolio companies, surveyed between February and April 2026. Its authors write that buyers are likely to distinguish between AI activity and AI strategy, and that a list of pilots or isolated productivity tools may not be enough to support valuation. Last year, just 7% of GPs identified AI as a challenge when preparing portfolio companies for sale, and this year the study puts it at 18% of GPs and 17% of portfolio companies identifying it as a concern.
FTI Consulting published its 2026 Private Equity Value Creation Index on June 4, 2026, from a global survey of 555 senior private equity leaders across 14 countries between January 19 and February 17, 2026. It found 66% of respondents reporting AI-related benefits within 12 months, up from 34% last year, and attributes that speed to a shift toward applying AI to a narrower set of established use cases tied to core value creation levers. Implementation remains uneven, and only 31% of firms report efficient or mostly efficient AI implementation. FTI defines its high performers, about 40 percent of respondents, as firms reporting they exceeded expected returns over the past 12 months, and finds 19% of high performers reporting exceeding their AI business case, compared to 5% of others. The release gives no fund size, assets under management or deal size for those 555, and they are firm-level leaders rather than the operators inside a portfolio company who would run a pilot.
One line per pilot does the cutting: the lever it serves, the person at the portfolio company who owns it, and the benefit, meaning the metric it moves, where that metric sits in monthly reporting and the before and after data a diligence team could rerun. Anything missing a lever, an owner or a named metric is cut. For management teams, EY says, fragmented data, unclear ownership of use cases, limited deployment at scale, and difficulty quantifying the impact of AI initiatives can make it harder to present a coherent AI narrative to buyers.
Ninety days covers the first pass across a portfolio, including companies already past the middle of their hold. Each company's CFO sends its list of pilots in month one, the CEO and CFO mark every pilot against the value creation plan's levers in month two, and the operating partner cuts the unmatched ones at the month three review. Surviving pilots stay in each company's own budget. Bain's private equity midyear report, published June 8, 2026, says the middle of the holding period is often where value creation gets lost.
The cut ends there. A pilot with a lever, an owner and too little time to have moved its metric is kept; at this stage the test is whether anyone can name its lever and metric. FTI's separate 2026 Private Equity AI Radar, published May 19, 2026, from 200 fund and operating leaders, finds that 95% of funds report AI initiatives meeting or exceeding their original business case criteria, a wider test than the Index's exceeding and a different survey, and says on the same page that those cases were often conservatively scoped.
