The challenge
The Head of AI is a new role at investment firms, and most people who hold it are the only person in their firm doing the job. This firm manages more than $25B in assets, and its Head of AI wanted an outside view: what other firms are doing with AI beyond what they announce, and where her own firm stands against them.
Her remit is the firm's own use of AI, from the tools its deal teams use to the data those tools draw on, and her decisions often have to clear legal and IT review before they can go ahead. As she put it, the firm has reached the size where AI is no longer optional:
“It's not a want anymore. It's a need. We've been around so long that if you get five MDs in a room, they're not going to have all the institutional knowledge they used to. We've hit the inflection point of scale.”
Our approach
We work with her one to one, as an adviser. Each session follows the decisions in front of her, so the advice addresses the firm's real choices rather than AI in general.
Alongside the advising, we bring what we see across the market, drawn from our conversations with private equity managing directors and heads of AI, our work inside portfolio companies, and our research into who leads AI at private equity firms. Part of the value is learning which problems are shared:
“I love these conversations with you guys. We think that we're studying unique things, and at the end of the day, most of it can be seen in multiple places.”
What Midici does for her
- We work through live decisions with her, such as selecting a new CRM for the firm's sourcing team and choosing a third-party development partner.
- We share what we see at other firms and portfolio companies, including how agent-based coding platforms are changing the cost of software development.
- We help her solve practical blockers. When legal and IT would not allow candidate development partners to work on the firm's own code, we suggested testing them on an open-source codebase with similar problems, so the firm could still see how each partner works with AI agents.
- We compare notes on change management: what drives AI adoption across a team, from leaders who demonstrate their own use of AI to programs that bring the most reluctant users to try it.
- We help her place the firm against its peers, so that she can make the case internally with evidence rather than anecdote.
