At a Glance

  • A recent survey by financial consulting firm Accordion found that private equity (PE) investors and the CFOs of their portfolio companies are at odds over the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologyshowing inconsistency。
  • Although 98% of PE backers have asked their CFOs to prioritize AI adoption, CFOs have reservations, with 68% saying their hesitation is "mainly because they don't know where to start or who to turn to," according to an Accordion press release on August 11 citing"AI in the PE-Backed Finance Function"survey.
  • "Backers are under tremendous pressure to create more value," Accordion CEO Nick Leopard said in a statement in the press release. "They see AI adoption across the portfolio as critical to value creation, so they're passing that pressure on to CFOs. But the reality is their portfolio CFOs aren't acting, at least not at the speed backers want."

Deeper Insights

The AI adoption gap comes as portfolio CFOs and their PE backers already face a critical misalignment on value creation, the AI-driven consulting firm found in a July study.

74% of PE backers said theirCFOs are falling short of expectations, citing three reasons for underperformance: failure to prepare for exits with urgency, finance fundamentals challenges, and not prioritizing performance or value creation, the July study showed.

Although both backers and CFOs see value creation as a key focus for the second half of the year, the July study also found a "worrying misalignment" on how to tackle the challenge: CFOs plan to focus on more "forward-looking value creation levers," while backers emphasize the need to "recover lost value by streamlining FP&A workflows such as month-end close processes," the press release on the July findings said.

Backers remain focused on improving such processes, the August survey results showed, which polled 200 PE backers and 200 PE-backed CFOs. On AI adoption, 99% of PE backers said the most effective way for CFOs to use it is "through discrete, practical finance workflows, such as automating close, cash flow forecasting, and invoice-to-cash automation," the press release said.

Other research has also pointed to AI's potential to boost productivity when integrated into certain aspects of the finance function; the technology can shortenmonthly financial close timeby about 7.5 days, according to a recent study by MIT Sloan School of Management and Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Although business leaders remain focused on AI's potential, ongoing macroeconomic pressures have made both PE investors and CFOs cautious. 83% of backers want CFOs to invest in AI now—leveraging potentially longer holding periods from tariff uncertainty—but 74% of CFOs said they believe their PE investors would prefer them to wait until uncertainty clears before investing, Accordion's research found.

Meanwhile, as economic uncertainty persists, many investors are also wary of commitments. Despite heavy bookbuilding activity in the second quarter of this year, much of it did notconvert into signed deals or transaction commitments, as "investors tend to wait and see how the tariff situation evolves," Big Four accounting firm KPMG said in its Q2 2025 Private Equity Pulse report released in July.

In the second quarter, proposed PE deployment in the U.S. was $202 billion across 1,608 deals, compared with $264.5 billion across 2,039 deals in the prior quarter, KPMG found.