Of 1,115 private equity firms, 11 can show AI changed something at a portfolio company.

The list comes from the SEC's register of investment advisers for September 2026. It shows 3,523 advisers based in the United States that manage at least one private equity fund. We merged advisers that share a website into one firm and kept firms whose private funds are mostly private equity funds by count. That left 2,297 firms. Size is the gross assets of a firm's private funds as reported to the SEC. Two well-known buyout firms, TA Associates and L Catterton, file their funds under other categories and are not on the list.

We read the sites on September 22 and 23, 2026. For each firm a reader took the homepage and up to 44 more pages: the pages that describe the firm's approach and value creation, its team pages, every page whose address names AI, and recent news. Where a filing pointed to the wrong site, such as a sub-brand or an old domain, we read the firm's own site from the other addresses on its filing. That applied to 23 firms. 2,041 of the 2,297 sites could be read. Blackstone, Carlyle, Clearlake Capital and Sycamore Partners block automated readers, so their sites were read in a browser.

926 of those firms turned out not to buy or back companies: funds of funds, secondaries, credit, real estate, infrastructure, venture capital and wealth managers. That leaves 1,115 firms.

"The playbook" means the firm's own site says it uses AI, or helps its portfolio companies use AI, as part of how it improves them. A result means the site names a portfolio company, says AI was put to work there, and says what changed. A portfolio company's AI product, or what that product does for its customers, does not count. A job counts when its title names AI.

Each firm was coded against that rubric by AI models reading the saved pages. Every yes carries the firm's own words, a quote of 15 words or fewer, and the page it came from. A script checked every quote against the saved text and turned any yes it could not find into a no. We read every claimed result by hand. 45 answers were changed by hand, each with a written reason.

This measures what firms say on their own websites. A firm can do serious AI work and not publish it, and a firm can publish more than it does. People are never named. Job titles are.

The data is the table below and the CSV, released under CC BY 4.0 with attribution to Fulkerson Advisors. If your firm's site says something we missed, email info@fulkersonadvisors.com and we'll read it again.