Private Equity’s AI Deals Lighten the Mood at Milken

News this week about private equity firms’ new joint ventures with OpenAI and Anthropic came at the right time for PE giants: just as they were about to sit down with their investors for days of meetings at the annual Milken Institute conference. 

The AI partnerships put the slew of PE firms involved—in Anthropic’s case, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Apollo, and, in OpenAI’s case, TPG, Bain Capital and Advent, to name a handful—closer to the center of the hyper-bullish AI action. The tie-ups, including a new one reported Tuesday involving Google, Blackstone and KKR, were a change from the darker questions hanging over PE firms, including what they’ll do with their overvalued enterprise software firms and when they’ll return cash to their backers. 

What happy timing. 

Regardless, the days of background meetings we had with investors in Beverly Hills, Calif., as well as some of the discussions on the event’s mainstage, reinforced the idea that Silicon Valley and Wall Street both are racing toward automating white-collar jobs in legal work, healthcare, insurance and any other sector you can name.