Blackstone hires Walmart AI whiz to supercharge its portfolio companies (2024)

"Blackstone's unparalleled scale and breadth of industries present an exciting challenge to create a blueprint for successfully integrating AI across various sectors," Mehrotra said in a written statement to BI. "By collaborating closely with these businesses and leveraging my expertise, we can drive innovation, efficiency, and growth, unlocking the transformative power of AI."

While at Walmart, Mehrotra was the vice president of applied AI, leading a team responsible for how AI was mixed into merchandising, including assortment, pricing, and inventory management. In 2023, Mehrotra helped lead his team to win the INFORMS Franz Edelman Award for updating the retail giant's trucking route to save energy and money. He also drove strategy for Walmart's generative AI playbook. Before that, Mehrotra worked as a data scientist at Uber and X, previously known as Twitter. He holds a doctorate in aeronautical engineering from CalTech.

Like its peers, Blackstone is eager to take advantage of AI, which stands to shake up businesses across virtually all industries. Blackstone, with $1 trillion of assets, owns massive holdings ranging from real estate to the media brand Hello Sunshine and skincare company Supergoop. That also gives it access to a mountain of data, which is foundational to the accuracy of AI models. But the need for talent was identified as the "single greatest impediment for our businesses to harness gains from AI," according to Katz, citing a survey of leaders from portfolio companies at a Blackstone CEO conference last month.

AI fever has unleashed a new demand for technologists specializing in the technology, from deep-learning experts to engineers who know natural-language processing. PE firms, in particular, have been "clamoring" to hire AI leaders who can deploy the technology among portfolio companies, Deepali Vyas, global head of fintech and applied intelligence at Korn Ferry, recently told BI. She said some middle-market and larger PE firms are offering pay packages of up to $2 million.

"Everybody you talk to, they don't have enough of the right talent to make these transformations happen at speed and at scale," Zac Maufe, who helps lead Google Cloud's financial services business, told BI. "That is a challenge we hear from customers all the time."

Increasingly, PE firms are turning to technology to boost an asset's selling price at exit. A lot of deals are between PE firms, meaning traditional strategies like reducing head count and leveraging debt, aren't as effective as they used to be, PwC's PE leader Manoj Mahenthiran previously told BI. Some have turned to the public cloud to accelerate growth and cut costs. In one case, Boston-based buyout firm Thomas H. Lee reduced one portfolio company's tech infrastructure costs by 50% thanks to moving it to the cloud.

Blackstone has a track record of investing in technology resources for its portfolio companies. The firm built a tool on the public cloud that ships internal portfolio-company data back to Blackstone. Data Direct, as the tool is called, has helped Blackstone investors stay up to date on portfolio companies in real time, which has led to a better understanding of the market and Blackstone's deal pipeline.