Capacity to innovate is one of the most important attributes for any business, and the artificial intelligence megatrend requires new levels of innovation from both GPs and portfolio companies. Ardian’s Data Science launched GAIA, Ardian’s first in-house AI application.
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x3 in daily users
between November 2024 and September 2025
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500
weekly active users
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280,000
questions answered since launch
Harnessing the power of data at Ardian
Data is at the heart of what we do as investors. Ardian hired its first data scientist for the infrastructure team in 2019. Today, several other investment teams now include a dedicated data scientist.
Ardian launched GAIA, its first in-house AI application, in 2024. GAIA – short for Generative AI at Ardian – is an AI chatbot, built on Azure OpenAI and Mistral’s large language models. GAIA is built on Azure OpenAI and Mistral’s large language models, fully hosted within Ardian’s secure cloud environment. This ensures that all data and interactions remain confidential and protected, with no information processed through public ChatGPT services. It enables our teams to summarize, analyze and compare documents quickly and securely, accelerating time-consuming but critical parts of their work.
Generative AI marks a significant milestone in our journey towards innovation and excellence. With now 450 weekly active users, GAIA supports all Ardian teams and makes us collectively more efficient. At Ardian, we are convinced that asset managers who succeed in integrating artificial intelligence in their day-to-day work will gain a competitive edge on the market.
More than half Ardian’s employees are already using GAIA to speed up certain tasks, analyzing or comparing documents. Generative AI has a huge range of possible applications – the aim is to identify the most valuable ones and share that knowledge across the firm. GAIA is an addition not a replacement for human expertise. It is a powerful tool to help create more value from the human intelligence within Ardian, for the benefit of LPs and portfolio companies.
GAIA has significantly boosted our productivity by streamlining information collection and speeding up our understanding of a particular deal. This in turn allows us to react faster and spend more time on interactions with stakeholders.
Strategic partnerships driving innovation
The relationships that our IT team, led by Vincent Joly, has built with Ardian’s key technology vendors was critical.
We were the first private equity firm to sign a framework agreement with Microsoft covering software licences and its cloud platform, Azure. Cloud migration was a major priority for our business in 2024, partly because it meant we could use ChatGPT and Mistral to build a private genAI chatbot that was fully secure and confidential.
The framework agreement allowed Ardian to create GAIA and it also benefited our portfolio companies.
The other key relationship was with Artefact, a former Expansion portfolio specialized in AI consultancy. They played an important role in developing GAIA.
AI-Driven strategies maximizing operational efficiency
Keeping our finger on the pulse of AI is a strategic priority, and we watch its impact on our portfolio companies and the sectors they operate in very carefully. Ardian’s Data Science team works closely with the investment teams and Ardian’s Digital Transformation team to help its portfolio companies apply AI to their business, and we create opportunities for them to learn from each other and share insights. That was the purpose of Ardian’s AI conference “The AI Imperative: rethinking alternative investment” organized in October 2024 in Paris.
Internally, GAIA is allowing us to explore how AI can enhance our productivity, which should be one of the biggest benefits of the AI megatrend.
We see exciting opportunities to use AI as a predictive tool, for example by creating multiple simulations so that we can model different outcomes. In an area such as portfolio construction, it could help us decide the optimum mix of assets and we also see great potential to use it for market screening.
