OMMAX at Actum PE Value Creation Forum 2026

AI is reshaping exit value in Private Equity: Key takeaways from the Actum Value Creation Forum

London, 17 March 2026 | Bringing together leading private equity investors and operators in London, this year’s Actum Group PE Value Creation Forum made one thing clear: the rules of value creation are shifting rapidly.

Across discussions throughout the forum, the intensity and urgency around AI were hard to ignore. This was particularly evident in our “Unlocking Value with AI” breakfast briefing hosted by OMMAX, where Dr. Stefan Sambol, Sinan Erhan, and Daniel Soujon expanded on these themes.

Key insights

AI is now at the center of every exit conversation. Investors increasingly ask: What is the AI equity story of the asset? Where does the company stand today, and what must be delivered before exit to make that story credible and backed by results? The scale of disruption is already visible in the so-called “SaaSpocalypse,” with nearly $300 billion in software market value erased. This shift highlights that winners are no longer defined by better software features alone, but by how deeply AI is embedded into business-critical processes.

At the same time, most portfolio companies are still struggling to move forward. While there is clear pressure to act on AI, there is often limited clarity on how to do so. Private equity operating teams and portfolio company executives frequently differ in their priorities, investment focus, and expectations around returns and exit relevance. This gap between ambition and execution has become a key barrier to value creation, despite strong early evidence of impact. Early adopters are already reporting up to 20% sales uplift from AI-enabled customer journeys.

Data remains the most critical and most avoided topic. While its importance is widely acknowledged, it is rarely addressed with sufficient rigor. Efforts to clean, structure, and govern data are often deprioritized in favor of more visible AI use cases. However, the assumption that AI can compensate for poor data quality does not hold. In practice, proprietary data is what makes business models defensible and valuable. The strongest setups combine proprietary data, the corresponding infrastructure, and AI applied on top.

This shift is structural. AI is no longer just another value creation lever; it is redefining how value is created, measured, and realized at exit. The key question for private equity firms is whether their portfolio companies are using AI primarily to generate insights or to actively drive business performance.

If you also attended the Value Creation Forum, we welcome the opportunity to connect and explore how OMMAX can support your value-creation agenda. Connect with our experts.