The last panel of the day was titled ‘From Fixer to Strategic Growth Architect.’ That could have been the title of the whole summit. The conversation kept circling the same shift: operating partners aren’t just parachuting in to fix broken portcos anymore. The bestare being pulled in earlier —sometimes at diligence — and are being held accountable for value creation as co-architects of the investment thesis, not cleanup crews.

This has real implications. When both deal teams and operating partners claim ownership of AI and transformation at the portco level, who owns it? That question came up more than once and didn’t always have a clean answer. The firms getting it right have made explicit decisions about accountability. The ones struggling are still figuring it out on the fly.

The role is also scaling in complexity — more portcos, more geographies, more functional depth required. How do you scale transformation without losing speed or ownership? That was one of the most practical tensions in the room.

The AI panel was the most grounded of the morning. Not ‘should we use AI’ — that debate is over. The real question: why are so many firms stuck in pilot mode while a handful have actually operationalized it?

Someone put it simply: they’ve stopped trying to precisely measure AI ROI at this stage. The value is clear enough. The focus now is building the systems that make AI work consistently — not deploying tools, but designing the infrastructure underneath them. Staff-ranked use case prioritization came up as a practical starting point for firms trying to move from experimentation to execution.

What derails AI in portcos? Same answers every time: security gaps that weren’t scoped, legacy systems that can’t handle the data, and an adoption gap between what leadership wants and what the sales or ops team actually uses. The GTM panel was blunt — embedding AI into workflows, not bolting tools on, is what separates initiatives that stick from ones that quietly die.

You can’t separate an AI initiative from the security architecture around it. Investors are now asking hard questions about data governance and AI exposure during diligence — that came up directly in the AI and Technology roundtable. Firms that haven’t built the security foundation are finding out about the gap at the worst possible time.

Cybersecurity came up repeatedly as something operating partners actively choose to outsource — not because it’s unimportant, but because it requires specialized, systematic capability that most mid-market portcos don’t have in-house and can’t build quickly. The virtual CISO model surfaced as the most practical answer for portcos that need real security depth withoutjustifying a full-time exec hire.

Security and infrastructure aren’t back-office anymore. They’re active value creation levers — and increasingly, they’re what buyers are looking at when they evaluate exit-readiness.

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The talent panel — Blackstone, Apollo, Mercer — was one of the most honest conversations of the day. Bottom line: performance equals talent. You can have the right playbook, the right AI tools, the right capital structure — and still underdeliver if the leadership layer isn’t right.

The discussion moved past CEO succession into the harder question: how do you build leadership pipelines across multiple levels, across multiple portcos, at scale? Incentive structures came up — comp, equity, milestone-based vesting tied to transformation outcomes — but the more interesting thread was about repeatable frameworks for leadership development that don’t require rebuilding from scratch at every new asset.

The AI and workforce reskilling angle connects here too. OPs are now expected to drive AI adoption and workforce transformation at the same time — without losing momentum during the transition. The firms handling it well are the ones who’ve made talent strategy a first-order input to the value creation plan, not an afterthought.

The buy-and-build panel was direct about something most firms won’t say out loud: integration failures are still destroying value, and most of the damage happens in the first 90 days. The pattern is familiar — assumptions made at diligence that don’t survive contact with operational reality, synergies that were real on paper but required execution capacity that wasn’t there.

One operating partner was candid about arriving post-close to find gaps that diligence hadn’t surfaced — not because diligence was sloppy, but because the operational questions weren’t being asked at the right time by the right people. This is the diligence disconnect: value creation plans that are built after close, rather than stress-tested before it.

The panel also raised the ownership question directly: deal team, operating partner, or dedicated PMO? No universal answer — but the consensus leaned toward operating partners being involved earlier, with explicit accountability, rather than being handed a plan to execute that they had no hand in building.

The operating partner role in 2026 is more demanding, more accountable, and more structurally complex than it was five years ago. The firms navigating it well share a few traits:

• They’ve made explicit decisions about who owns what — between deal teams, ops teams, and portco management — rather than letting it resolve informally.
• They’ve built operational infrastructure before deploying AI tools, not after.
• They treat security, talent, and integration capacity as value creation inputs, not support functions.
• They are involving operating partners at diligence, not just post-close.

The question worth sitting with: if you mapped your current value creation playbook against those four traits — where are the gaps, and when did they last get an honest look?

If any of this resonates, I’m happy to continue the conversation — feel free to reach out directly here.