These targets differ from “PE buying traditional companies and then transforming them”: the investee first runs its own partially AI-native business models, and the PE firm’s role is to amplify them.
Fact
- September 4, 2026, EQT announced the acquisition of a majority stake in professional insurance broker McGill and Partners for USD 2,000,000,000.
- McGill has roughly 600 employees and revenue of over USD 250,000,000; in 2026, EBITDA is expected to be about USD 100,000,000, higher than approximately USD 60,000,000 in 2025.
- After obtaining control, EQT explicitly made continued investment in technology, data capabilities, and digital solutions a key focus for the next stage of value creation.
- 2025, McGill became one of the first brokers in the London insurance market to integrate Salesforce Agentforce agents into its own Underscore platform, and later incorporated Artificial Labs, Google, and Salesforce into the same end‑to‑end brokerage system, covering risk submission, market quoting, underwriting and subsequent processing.
- 2026, McGill established an agent underwriting system with AIG and Palantir: AIG can automatically execute underwriting rules, planning to cover 25% of capacity in McGill’s top USD 1,600,000,000 premium portfolio; Palantir’s data ontology continuously feeds back risk exposure, limit usage, model outcomes and loss information.
Assessment
AI Buyout has presented a second type of target: traditional‑industry companies that have already implemented parts of an AI‑native operating model but whose capital and scale have not yet caught up. For these companies, the key valuation variables will gradually shift from “how many employees, how many customers” to “how much revenue, how many customers, how many transactions each professional can manage, and how many core processes are executed autonomously by agents.”
First run the AI‑native workflow internally, then let control and capital scale it up—this is a new path parallel to “PE‑driven transformation.”—— Fan
Counter‑evidence
- EBITDA rose from about USD 60,000,000 to about USD 100,000,000; the company did not disclose how much of that increase came from AI, so a direct attribution is not possible.
- McGill has not disclosed job reductions or per‑employee productivity figures resulting from AI, and the actual proportion of autonomous execution by agents remains unknown.
- The system with AIG and Palantir is still under development, and the "planned coverage of 25% capacity" is a target rather than an achieved state.
- The core bargaining power of insurance brokers derives from personal networks and underwriting relationships, and process automation may not change this aspect.
Source: FDEPE tracking database. The original disclosures are in the EQT Group, McGill and Partners announcements; the original link is pending.