Private Equity Is Deploying an Army of AI Wonks to Embed in the Firms They Back

Private-equity firms are known for slashing costs, overhauling businesses and boosting revenue, and now have a new tool for carrying out that playbook.

Blackstone BX 1.40%increase; green up pointing triangle and Hellman & Friedman have formed a roughly 160-person team of artificial-intelligence experts with Anthropic to deploy at businesses, starting with their own portfolio companies. The push is part of a $1.5 billion joint venture between the AI giant and Wall Street firms, which also includes Apollo, General Atlantic and Goldman Sachs among the backers.

“What we liked was this was a senior engineering team,” said Rodney Zemmel, global head of 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 firm known as Ode, far beyond the world of private-equity owned businesses. Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Anthropic are each committing to invest around $300 million to the venture.

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

The efforts come as business leaders have been cracking down on their AI spending, and scrutinizing whether the costs are worthwhile. White-collar anxiety over AI has surged, but executives have dialed back their warnings of mass layoffs, with 20% of CEOs believing AI investments will spur significant job cuts in a May survey from EY-Parthenon, down from 46% in January 2025.

Private-equity executives said Ode will help build new product lines to drive up revenue, and that cost-savings aren’t the primary focus of their work.

Blackstone plans to roll out the effort at 25 of its more than 270 portfolio companies, with engineers from Ode already embedded at six of its businesses. An executive on Blackstone’s applied AI team spends one to two days a week on-site at portfolio companies helping with the rollout, Zemmel said.

At the Chamberlain Group, a maker of garage-door openers that Blackstone acquired in 2021 at a $5 billion valuation, Ode’s AI experts are among the 18 engineers who sit in six, three-person pods at the company’s headquarters in Oak Brook, Ill.

The maker of LiftMaster garage-door openers is leaning on AI experts to expand optional software features, such as ones that notify homeowners when their packages are delivered and garbage is picked up. Its products also recently started recognizing designated people and alerting the homeowner.

Chamberlain is on track to add more than 3 million video cameras to homeowners’ properties this year, which are needed to run advanced AI features. That is compared with 1.7 million cameras last year. Ode engineers are now helping Chamberlain test software that can learn a family’s routines, like when they arrive home every day, and flag deviations to the homeowner.

The company expects its digital-doorman business to generate $500 million in annual revenue by 2030, compared with the $100 million planned for this year and $40 million last year, said Jeff Meredith, Chamberlain’s chief executive. Before the joint venture, Chamberlain estimated that business would top out around $160 million. Overall, the company is on pace to book more than $2 billion in revenue this year, he said.

Chamberlain also expects more cost efficiencies from ramping up Claude’s use. The advertising campaign for its new smart-access products around Amazon’s Prime Day in June was 10 times cheaper than a year earlier, in part because of AI tools, Zemmel said.

Ode in May acquired Fractional AI, an AI-services startup where most of the venture’s AI engineers worked. Chamberlain had already been working with Fractional AI since late last year.

At Citrin Cooperman, a Blackstone-backed professional services firm, Ode engineers are building a portal designed to let accountants and financial advisers collaborate and interact more effectively with clients.

Hellman & Friedman also began the Ode rollout with an accounting firm, Baker Tilly, one of its 30 companies. Ode engineers sit with audit leaders to map out the daily workflows of financial and tax accountants to gauge where to ramp up use of AI agents. Ode staff helps supplement Baker Tilly’s small internal software engineering team.

Portfolio companies like Chamberlain pay for Ode’s services through a commercial consulting or service agreement.

Sponsors can’t force their companies to use certain services. “It’s up to the private equity-backed companies to decide whether to use Ode—based on the cost and best fit for the project,” Zemmel said.

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