The AI Circle Cohort
Builds Your Fund’s AI Operating System.

Nine live sessions over six weeks for impact fund teams, equity and debt in one room. Your team works through the investment lifecycle on its own documents, alongside a small group of similar funds, and joins the Impact Investors AI Circle for twelve months. Cohort 2 starts 23 November 2026 and cohort 3 in early 2027.

Register your interest → See the dates

En español

Why a cohort

Funds Adopt AI One Person at a Time.
A Cohort Turns It Into a Fund Process.

In most impact funds an associate finds a faster way to screen and a partner drafts differently, often on personal accounts, with no shared method and no written rules. When the AI Circle’s first cohort started in July 2026, a written AI use policy scored 2.25 out of 5 across five impact funds (Accendo Associates baseline survey, July 2026). The wider industry shows the same gap. Only 9% of private equity firms are confident they could pass an AI governance audit within 90 days, while 80% are already exploring or piloting agentic AI (Grant Thornton, 2026 AI Impact Survey).

Limited partners and portfolio company boards now ask how a fund uses and governs AI. The cohort gives the whole team one method, one set of rules and shared tools, so the capability stays with the fund when people move on.

Our approach

One Lifecycle Map,
Three Levels of AI at Every Stage.

We describe a fund’s work in eleven stages, from origination to exit or repayment, with a map for equity funds and a map for debt funds. At every stage the team decides where AI helps most and at what level. We call the result the Fund AI.OS, the fund’s own AI operating system. It belongs to the fund, not to any one person.

Level 1

Prompts and skills

Run by each team member on the AI assistant the fund already uses: Claude, ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot. No new platform is needed.

Level 2

Automated workflows

Agents that run a chain of steps on a trigger, such as a new deal in the inbox or a quarterly report arriving, and log what they did.

Level 3

Invest-tech platforms

Bought platforms that automate a whole stage, chosen from a curated vendor list mapped to the lifecycle.

At every level

Three rules

One record per stage, every run logged, and a named person who owns every judgment. These rules turn individual use into a fund process.

How the cohort runs

Nine Sessions in Six Weeks,
Light on Partners’ Time.

Three plenary sessions
60 minutes each, for partners and for IT, compliance and legal colleagues. They set the direction, the data rules and the AI use policy.
Six working sessions
90 minutes each, for up to three team members per fund. Each session takes stages of the lifecycle and builds working tools on the fund’s own material.
Office hours
A one-to-one slot for each fund every two weeks during the cohort, and office hours through the membership year, to apply the workflows to live work.
Time commitment
A partner commits at least three hours and is welcome at every session. An operations or investment lead commits the nine working hours plus about three hours a week of self-study.
Equity and debt together
Every session carries the equity and the debt reading of each stage, so a debt fund sees how an equity fund handles the same decision and the reverse.
What each fund gets

A Working AI Operating System
and Twelve Months in the AI Circle.

By the end of the cohort

What the fund leaves with

An AI use policy template, drawing on the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, ISO/IEC 42001 and the OECD AI Principles, which the fund adapts itself or in office hours. Level 1 tools in daily use. An end-to-end design for its Level 2 automations. A curated vendor list for Level 3. Its own position on the lifecycle map, with a named owner for each stage.

Twelve months from the cohort start

What membership adds

A skills and agents library updated monthly, the curated invest-tech list, the Accendo Signals newsletter, webinars, in-person gatherings, team check-ins and office hours. Membership is held by the fund, so it continues when people change.

Cohort 1 results

Governance Scores Rose About 40%
in Six Weeks.

Five impact funds across three continents completed the first cohort between July and September 2026: SPE Capital, the Accion Digital Transformation Fund, elea, LocFund Next and Shell Foundation. The same eight participants answered four questions before and after the program, on a scale of 1 to 5. The two governance measures that started lowest moved the most.

Approved AI tools, with rules for their use
2.50 in July, 3.50 in September, up 40%
A written AI use policy
2.25 in July, 3.13 in September, up 39%
AI used for impact data and reporting
2.88 in July, 3.25 in September, up 13%
Team confident using AI for everyday tasks
3.63 in July, 4.00 in September, up 10%
Average of the four
2.81 in July, 3.47 in September, up 23%

Source: Accendo Associates AI readiness survey, July 2026, and post-program survey, September 2026. Eight participants from five funds, 32 paired scores.

The Circle helped us move from thinking about AI as a set of individual tools to thinking about how it can be embedded more systematically across the fund.
Ghassen SeghaierVice President, Private Equity, SPE Capital
The Circle helped in realizing the capabilities of AI tools in deal management, identifying gaps through our processes, and how we can manage repetitive tasks and reporting, which take up a lot of the team’s time.
Abhishek AgrawalManaging Partner, Accion Digital Transformation Fund
Safeguards

Portfolio Data Stays
With Each Fund.

Each fund works inside its own tools and on its own documents. Nothing a fund builds is visible to other funds, and direct competitors are not placed in the same cohort. Data classification is agreed in the setup session, taking account of the jurisdictions each fund works in.

Open cohorts

Choose the Cohort
That Fits Your Calendar.

Cohort 2
Starts Monday 23 November 2026 and runs for six weeks, with a holiday break from 15 December to 10 January. Enrollment closes on Monday 16 November 2026.
Cohort 3
Starts in early 2027. The full session calendar and the enrollment deadline are confirmed on the fit call.
Session time
07:00 New York, which is 12:00 London, 17:30 Mumbai and 20:00 Singapore.
Who it is for
Impact fund managers with USD 100 million to 500 million under management, in equity or debt, whose teams already use an AI assistant. Each cohort is a small group of similar funds with no direct competitors.
Seats
A place is per fund and includes up to three team members in the working sessions, with partners welcome at every session. The method lasts when it lands in a team rather than with one person.
What happens next

Registering Interest Starts a Conversation.
It Commits You to Nothing.

You register
The form below asks which cohort suits you, which instrument you work in, what you manage, and how many people would join the working sessions.
We send a readiness survey
One link per person, about ten minutes each. It makes the fit call specific to your fund and gives you a baseline to measure against at the end.
We hold a fit call
Thirty minutes on where your fund is today and which peers you would sit with. If the cohort is not the right fit for your fund, we say so.
You decide
The fee is set per fund by fund size and comes with the readiness survey. Fees are invoiced in US dollars and settled by bank transfer before the first session of your cohort.
Register

Tell us a little about your fund. Nothing here commits you, and we reply within one business day.


Questions first? Write to aicircle@accendoassociates.com. If a cohort is more than you want to take on now, the AI Circle Intensive is five hours across two mornings for one person, and Set Your Baseline is a free one-hour session.