Every PE portfolio company is now expected to have an AI strategy.

Lovely.

Most of them still cannot answer three quite basic questions without a minor archaeological dig through spreadsheets, CRM exports, call logs, and somebody from finance doing a heroic amount of guesswork.

What happened to revenue last week.
Which channels actually drove it.
Where margin leaked on the way through.

But sure, let’s talk about agentic workflows.

AI is not a strategy. It is a multiplier.

If the underlying business is messy, AI just helps you scale the mess faster, with better branding and a more expensive software bill.

The firms that get actual value from AI will not be the ones with the flashiest board slides. It will be the ones that did the boring adult work first:

clean data
instrumented funnel
working CRM
pricing discipline
basic operational visibility

Not glamorous. Just useful. Which is why it gets ignored until someone misses the number and suddenly everyone becomes very interested in “digital transformation.”

Private equity has spent years pretending value creation is a workshop. It isn’t. It is infrastructure, discipline, and operators who can tell the difference between a real capability and a nice bit of theatre.

It's funny 'cos it's true.