AI product studio · private equity

The spend is up.
The EBITDA isn’t.

LightCI is an AI product studio for private equity. Inside portfolio companies, we enable the people and engineer the AI systems that show up in EBITDA.

Talk to LightCI Read the 2026 PE × AI report

100+

Portfolio companies
served

Claude Partner Network · Select Services Partner

Private equity · 2023 → 2026From the 2026 report →

We close the gap inside each portfolio company, two ways.

EnablementEngineering

Some of the sponsors we work with

Vista Equity Partners

Battery Ventures

EQT

General Atlantic

Warburg Pincus

Insight Partners

Berkshire Partners

Great Hill Partners

And dozens more across their portfolios.

Why it fails

The same four mistakes, in almost every portfolio.

All four come from one root cause: treating AI as a feature layer instead of a reason to rebuild.

Bolting AI onto legacy products

A chatbot on a ten-year-old codebase is still a ten-year-old product.

No cost attribution

Token spend lands in COGS with nobody watching. Margin erodes silently.

No governance

No data rights, no logs, no evals. Buyers find it in diligence.

Assuming rebuilds take years

They take months. The assumption is what keeps portfolios stuck.

And it shows up at exit

of buyers walked from a deal because of AI risk.

Diligence now covers AI maturity, data provenance, and governance.

−0%

EV haircut for weak AI maturity. Already applied by 40% of investors.

A feature veneer does not survive it. Evidence does.

So we do it differently

Installed, not advised.

Two motions · one operating model

Enablement activates the people.
Engineering builds the systems.

Most portfolio companies need both, in that order.

01 · Enablement4 weeks per function

The workforce, working with AI by week four.

Governed AI in week one. Function by function, real processes become named skills.

Claude rollout with governance and audit
5–8 shipped skills per function
Adoption and ROI the CFO can defend

Weekly active usageWeek 1 → 12

— — typical license rollout84% sustained

Skills shipped8 / 8

Variance narrativeFinanceNDA triageLegalTicket routingITVendor onboardingOpsBoard-pack roll-forwardFinanceRenewal briefSalesPolicy Q&AHRIncident summaryIT

02 · Engineering~3 months to production

Agents in production. Systems the company owns.

Senior engineers inside the company. Agents wired to the systems where the work lives.

Finance, customer, ops, board-pack agents
A semantic layer the company owns
Evals, telemetry, audit from day one

Collections agent · run #4,812running

Pull open invoices

4 ERPs · 14 business units

Score payment risk

Per invoice · history + terms

Classify disputes

Pricing · PO mismatch · delivery

Rank collector worklists

9 collectors · 1,240 accounts

Post to queues

Human approves top 5% by value

62→49

DSO, days

~$26M

working capital

3×

accounts / collector

Enablement finds the fifty processes. Engineering automates the five that move EBITDA.

How it fits together

Systems of record. Then a layer your experts built. Then agents.

Not a chatbot on the ERP. A layer built with the people who know the business, then agents on top.

Systems of record

What the company already runs

ERP · per portco

CRM & support

Billing & payroll

Data warehouse

Contracts & PDFs

Spreadsheets

Semantic layer

Built with your subject-matter experts

Definitions your SMEs signed off

Permissions per role and entity

Evals: 10–30 golden cases per skill

Every action logged and attributable

One layer. Reused by every agent and every skill that follows.

Agents

They act, they do not suggest

Finance agentslive

Customer agentslive

Ops agentslive

Board-pack agentslive

Confidence-gated: auto-route, ask, or escalate.

Outcomes

What the sponsor sees

EBITDA

cost out, revenue in

Working capital

DSO, DPO, close

Exit narrative

AI-native, evidenced

Across the hold period

From the first hundred days to the exit narrative.

One operating model. The same team from diligence to the data room.

DiligencePre-close

Know what AI is worth before you price it.

What AI is worth in this target, as a number the IC can price.

Both

First 100 daysDay 0 → 100

Governed AI in every hand. Shadow AI closed.

Governed AI in week one. The first function ships skills before the first board meeting.

Enablement

Value creationYear 1 → 3

Agents on the processes that move EBITDA.

Agents in production on the processes that move the P&L.

Engineering

Exit readinessYear 3 → 5

An AI-native story a buyer can verify.

Telemetry and audit trails that survive diligence. Evidence, not a slide.

Telemetry

PRISM · our enablement methodology

One program in.
A spectrum out.

A license is not a program. PRISM is how enablement becomes measurable.

Foundation

Governed AI behind SSO. Shadow AI closes in week one.

Function workshops

One function, four weeks, five to eight shipped skills.

Telemetry

Adoption, impact, cost, safety. One dashboard.

Company OS

Workforce, process inventory, and skills become one layer over every system.

Explore PRISM90-day program · scoped in writing before work starts

84%

weekly active use, sustained

skills · 5 functions · 90 days

$4.2M

annualized at one retailer

100%

of actions logged, attributable

Selected work

Inside the portfolio.

Live systems. Measured numbers.

to commercial release

An agent that installs itself, maps every page, and instruments the product on its own.

$10M+ new revenue target · zero post-sales headcount

Vista Equity Partners

Portfolio program

Dozens

of portfolio companies

One operating model, installed company by company across a $100B+ software portfolio.

3 months average to ship · 100% production, not prototypes

The adaptive learning engine behind a school day that finishes before lunch.

2-hour academic day · 2.3× faster yearly progress

See all case studies

2026 report

State of AI Adoption in Private Equity

The rebuild playbook, the pricing shift, and the first hundred days.

Read the report

Inside the report7 chapters

01Executive summary

02The market has already moved

03Features vs. AI-native

04Build or buy

05Where the efficiency actually comes from

06What it does to valuation

07The rebuild playbook and the first hundred days

The gap is closing without you

Your portfolio will not wait.

Thirty minutes. Bring one portfolio company and one number you want to move.

Talk to LightCI See the work

The spend is up.The EBITDA isn’t.