Private equity has decided that Data and AI will drive the next decade of value creation. It has not yet decided who should own it, and until now nobody had mapped the people actually doing the work.
The gap between ambition and delivery is a talent one
70% of GPs expect AI to deliver high impact across their portfolios within three to five years. Just 6% say it is delivering that impact today (McKinsey, Global Private Markets Report 2026).
Almost none of the distance between those two numbers is technological. The tools are commercially available, and the budgets have been signed off. What is missing is execution, and the wider research is unanimous about where execution actually sits:
- BCG puts 70% of AI value in the people, organisation and processes around the technology, against 20% in what you build and 10% in what you buy. (AI-First Companies Win the Future: Private Equity, 2026)
- FTI Consulting found investment levels between funds seeing real returns and those still waiting to be broadly comparable. What separates them is execution discipline and the integration of the right talent across the investment lifecycle. (2026 PE AI Radar)
- Bain frames inaction as a strategic choice rather than a neutral one. (Private Equity Midyear Report 2026)
The pressure behind it is deal maths. A buyout that needed 5% annual EBITDA growth to return 2.5x a decade ago now needs closer to 12% (Bain & Company, 2026). Value creation has to carry the deal; AI is the lever most funds are reaching for, and whether that lever works depends on who is holding it.
Yet the people doing this work have gone largely unmapped. Orr Search has now mapped that population in full: 480 Data and AI value creation professionals across almost 90 private equity funds, with 30 funds profiled in depth through direct interviews with their teams. It is the first systematic view of who is building this capability.
The findings are published in full in Orr Search’s Data and AI in Private Equity Value Creation: Talent Insights Report 2026.
Five findings from the 2026 Data and AI Talent Insights Report
1. Value creation owns the function
63% of the funds we profiled in depth have embedded Data and AI within value creation or portfolio operations. The earlier instinct was to centralise at fund level and deploy opportunistically. That instinct has largely gone, and the function now sits closest to where the commercial work happens.
The report sets out all four structural models we found, and the share of funds running each.
2. The teams are far smaller than the ambition suggests
The median Data and AI team across the funds we profiled is five people. Across the wider tracked market, more than four in ten funds run this function with a single person.
Small does not mean unsophisticated. For plenty of mid-market funds, it is a deliberate design: a lean senior hub, often at operating partner level, orchestrating delivery through external providers, partnerships, or data leaders embedded in portfolio companies.
What the data does not show is the relationship you would expect between team size and fund size. Beyond the mega fund tier, it breaks down almost entirely.
The report has the full distribution by AUM band, which is the quickest way to see where your own fund sits against its peer group.
3. Nine in ten have never worked in private equity before
Only 10% of the 480 people in these roles had prior PE fund experience before joining their current firm.
In most senior PE searches, prior fund experience is a standard screen. In this market, it rarely is, and the data explains why: a hard PE-experience requirement would shrink the shortlist to one candidate in ten. The emphasis falls instead on the thing that is actually scarce, which is the ability to translate data capability into commercial value.
That single figure should change how a brief for this function gets written.
4. Seniority resolves the MBB question
Clients typically ask for current or former MBB and tier 2 strategy profiles at the leadership and strategic level, where stakeholder gravitas and strategic and technical fluency carry the role.
Looked at across the whole population, the data appears to contradict that instinct: 49% of the 480 came up through industry alone, and 81% have industry experience outside consulting.
Both instincts are right. They are about different layers. As those leaders build teams beneath them, the requirement fades, and the mix shifts decisively to industry and specialist execution.
Which layer you are hiring into should shape how the brief is written. The report has the full background and seniority breakdown, layer by layer, with the MBB share marked at each level.
5. It is a two-speed market, and there is a genuine way in
Two-thirds of the people in these roles arrived since the start of 2023. Around them sits a smaller veteran core who built the foundations and now run the function.
The volume of hands-on arrivals points to net expansion, not just movement between funds. Funds are no longer just hiring a Head of Data; they are building the engine room underneath, and that engine room is more open to emerging talent than the seniority of this market would suggest.
“Eighteen months ago, the typical brief was exploratory: a first, often standalone hire with a loosely defined mandate. Today clients arrive with a structure in mind, a view on where the function should sit, and increasingly a requirement that the leader can carry the fund’s AI story externally, to portfolio boards and to LPs.”
Tom Orr, Founder & CEO, Orr Search
The thread through all five
No fund is meaningfully behind. Some are simply earlier than others. The norms on structure and seniority are being set right now, by the funds hiring today. Two or three good hires put a mid-market fund ahead of most of its peer group. Later it will take more people, and it will cost more to get them.
Get the full report
Data and AI in Private Equity Value Creation: Talent Insights Report 2026 covers all of the above in full, plus team size distribution by fund tier, the full background and seniority breakdown of all 480 professionals, a guest perspective from Steve Budd of AI Pathfinder on how funds are actually mobilising, and our five forward calls on where this market goes next.
Get in touch to request your copy.
If you are building or scaling a Data and AI capability and want to talk through what the data means for your specific situation, feel free to reach out.
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Orr Search is the executive search partner for private equity value creation. We build portfolio operations teams at fund level and place exceptional leadership talent across portfolio businesses, operating across the UK, Europe and the US.
Sources:
- McKinsey, Global Private Markets Report 2026
- Bain & Company, Private Equity Midyear Report 2026
- Bain & Company, Global Private Equity Report 2026
- Boston Consulting Group, AI-First Companies Win the Future: Private Equity, Executive Perspectives, January 2026
- FTI Consulting, 2026 Private Equity AI Radar
