Private Equity Groups Begin Placing AI Experts in Portfolio Companies

Private equity firms have reportedly begun placing artificial intelligence experts within their portfolio companies to grow those businesses.

That’s according to a report Friday (Aug. 21) from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), which cites the example of Wall Street firms like Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman’s $1.5 billion partnership with Anthropic to form an approximately 160-person team of AI experts.

“What we liked was this was a senior engineering team,” said Rodney Zemmel, who heads Blackstone’s operating team. “It’s not like a bunch of kids who just learned AI.”

The plan is to offer the services of the joint venture, a stand-alone company known as Ode, well beyond the world of private-equity-owned businesses. Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Anthropic have each pledged to invest around $300 million to the effort.

OpenAI has launched a rival venture that would offer consulting services to companies, with a $4 billion investment headed by private-equity firm TPG.

As WSJ noted, these efforts are happening as business leaders scrutinize AI spending. While white-collar anxiety about the technology has jumped, executives have begun walking back predictions that AI will trigger sweeping job cuts.

Private-equity executives said Ode will help establish new product lines to boost revenue, and that cost savings aren’t the main focus of their work.

Blackstone plans to bring the effort to 25 of its more than 270 portfolio companies, with engineers from Ode already operating at six of these businesses.

Among these companies is the Chamberlain Group, a maker of garage-door openers that Blackstone purchased in 2021 that has begun turning to AI experts to expand software features like ones that inform homeowners if packages have arrived.

Ode’s customer pipeline, including companies that aren’t private-equity-backed, is “immense and growing by the day,” said Chris Taylor, the group’s chief executive.

In other AI news, PYMNTS wrote last week about the increasing use of AI shopping tools, a trend demonstrated by recent corporate earnings.

“While still small in total today, as more consumers begin to explore the benefits of agentic shopping, Target’s digital traffic sourced from external AI platforms is growing,” Target CEO Michael Fiddelke said during an earnings call last week.

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence shows consumers are already comfortable using AI as a shortcut to researching purchases, with 38% of AI users saying they used the technology to compare prices across retailers, and 36% using it to find deals.

“Willingness extends further than research alone,” the report added, as additional PYMNTS Intelligence research found that 49% of consumers interested in agentic AI “would let an assistant complete both routine and larger, research-driven purchases on their own.”

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