Excel and PowerPoint have had an absurdly good run in private equity.

For years, they were not just tools. They were status symbols. If you were brilliant at the model and deadly in a deck review, the industry assumed you were smart enough to help build value.

Maybe.
Maybe not.

Plenty of people became extremely senior while contributing mostly organised confidence.

Now AI is busy turning that confidence into software.

Which means the people who were rewarded for spreadsheet theatre and presentation polish may be about to discover that those were never the valuable skills. They were just the visible ones.

The valuable skills were always the harder, uglier ones:
changing behaviour
making decisions
fixing execution
driving commercial performance
getting management teams to stop talking and start moving

Turns out real operating ability is harder to automate than slide formatting.
Who knew.