Recently, senior IR leaders gathered at the PEI IR Forum to get specific about what’s changing in fundraising and LP relationships. What came through were genuine discussions around real operational gaps, current LP expectations, and the role AI is starting to play in both. The distance between knowing it and doing something about it is where firms are separating.
Here’s a recap of the most salient points from the event:
Trust is the rarest asset in the room
Professor Paul Argenti opened the Forum with a number that stops the conversation: only roughly 30% of stakeholders trust private markets firms. The response from the room wasn’t panic, but it wasn’t dismissal either. The firms earning trust aren’t doing it through volume, they’re doing it through consistency, clarity, and alignment between what they say internally and what they communicate to LPs. The GP who tells a different story in the quarterly letter than they did in the last fund close creates an LP who remembers both versions. That gap leads to the next point….
LPs are already using AI on your communications
This point came up in a panel on resiliency in a shifting macro landscape, hosted by Ray Grant, VP of Strategic Initiatives and Partnerships at Altvia. The panel’s central argument was that consistent, proactive communication across multiple channels like email, LP portal, direct outreach, is the baseline for maintaining LP confidence.
One of the more memorable moments came from a panelist who made the case for embedding your firm narrative into internal culture, not just external communications. The analogy: put broccoli in front of your kids every day until they start eating it. The teams sending consistent messages to LPs are the ones who have made that narrative part of how the firm operates internally, across every function that touches an investor relationship.
LPs are also raising the stakes on consistency in a more direct way. They are running AI tools against the full history of their GP relationships, checking prior communications against current ones, looking for inconsistencies, promises not kept, language that drifted. The implication is direct: if LPs now have a complete, searchable view of the relationship, IR teams need to as well. The information asymmetry that GPs once held has inverted.
On AI: don’t build your own
There was notable consensus in the room against firms attempting to build proprietary, integrated AI solutions. The reasoning may seem counterintuitive: off-the-shelf commercial tools impose standard operating procedures on users while custom builds create perpetual exceptions. However, as one panelist put it, private markets firms are not technology companies and shouldn’t pretend otherwise. Find a trusted technology partner. Don’t reinvent the infrastructure.
That said, AI is genuinely useful in specific applications: drafting LP communications, accelerating data hygiene, flagging engagement signals. Where it falls short is in replacing the human judgment that distinguishes a fund update from a form letter. Panelists flagged “AI voice” as a real risk in quarterly reports, where the prose starts to read like no one in particular wrote it. The consensus: AI works best as an enabler of better thinking and faster execution, not a shortcut for strategy or voice.
IR and marketing are converging on compliance
One of the more practical sessions focused on cross-functional alignment. One panelist described an IR team that was unaware of a capital call posted the day before an on-site LP meeting. The LP asked questions the team couldn’t answer. That kind of gap is no longer acceptable. The firms getting ahead of that problem are the ones bringing IR, legal, compliance, and finance together earlier, treating compliance as a partner in messaging rather than a final checkpoint. It’s a structural change, not a process tweak.
The thread running through all of it
IR has to be proactive. As one keynote framed it, you’re fighting for the re-up every single day in every touch between formal raises. That’s not a new idea, but the operational requirements for actually doing it are changing. LPs are more sophisticated, better equipped, and more willing to redirect capital based on the experience of the relationship rather than performance alone. The gap between what LPs can see and what GPs can see is closing, whether GPs are ready for it or not.
None of it works without the foundation
Near the end of the AI panel, the moderator asked for a show of hands: who feels confident they have a single system capturing all LP data across IR, fund administration, and accounting? Zero hands went up.
That moment was the most honest summary of where the industry actually stands. Proactive IR, AI-enabled communications, co-invest tracking, re-up intelligence: all of it depends on LP data that is clean, connected, and current. Fragmented systems don’t just slow teams down. They create the exact gaps that LPs are now finding for themselves.
Altvia is built on that foundation: a platform purpose-built for the full capital raise and LP engagement lifecycle, with data integrity at the core rather than bolted on after the fact. If any of this maps to conversations your own team is having, we’d welcome the next one. Request a demo.