Only 5 of a PE firm's 60 portfolio companies have engineers; here's the AI playbook for the rest
alex_verem · x · 2026-10-14
A PE firm's AI team says only about five of its 60 portfolio companies have any engineers or a CTO. The AI plan for the other 55 can't start with training a dev team, and a 12-person fund AI team can't build and host software for 55 companies. But the upside is real: in some of their industries no worthwhile software is for sale, and agentic coding makes custom software viable at their size.
The author's order of operations for a portco with no engineers: pick one workflow that eats hours weekly (billing, quoting, scheduling) and prove it in a month; bring in an outside team to build and run it, paying only when it works; put the person who runs that workflow today in charge of it.
Related event: PE Data Shows Portfolio Firms Lack Engineers While AI Unlocks Millions(2 posts)→
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