Bain's 2026 Global Private Equity Report puts a new number on the table: portfolio companies are now expected to deliver 10–12% annual EBITDA growth. The historic benchmark was closer to 5%.
That's not a small shift. That's a different game.
The conversation around how to get there is focused on AI. That makes sense. The tools are genuinely powerful. But there's a step that keeps getting skipped.
You can't automate your way to 12% growth if you don't first understand where the friction actually lives. Most operational inefficiency isn't loud. It doesn't show up on a dashboard. It lives in the handoffs, the workarounds, the processes that exist because someone built them years ago and no one has questioned them since.
The ones who close that gap won't be the fastest adopters. They'll be the ones who understood their operations before they started optimizing them.
The pressure is real. The tools are ready. The missing piece is still the same one it's always been — someone willing to ask the right questions first.