This week we brought together CEOs and leaders from across the Hg portfolio for our Silicon Valley Leadership Summit.

If last year was about AI immersion, this year was about transformation. The focus: what it takes to move from experimentation to real impact.

The Hg portfolio has scaled AI impact by 5x since last year's event. But the opportunity ahead is even bigger. Software businesses can now go beyond supporting workflows to delivering the work itself.

Chris Kindt, our Head of Value Creation, shares his takeaways from the week:

We conclude a great few days in Silicon Valley - stepping away from the day-to-day and pressure-testing what AI transformation really means now. As I travel back, some takeaways from the week:

Agentic AI is the non-negotiable in 2026. Model progress remains fast, taking on tasks increasingly independently. This means employees can get to new levels of leverage, but only if they operate differently, running threads in parallel. Kevin Weil warning against "sprinkling AI on existing processes" resonated: the winners will re-engineer operating models ground-up.

Get agent ready: as AI accelerates tasks, new bottlenecks will swiftly emerge "unless you ready your processes end-to-end" (Elias Apel, Lucanet). Think about how code gets reviewed, how product requirements get defined, how GTM gets 'machine ready' (Varun Anand). Plan ahead - set up processes before accelerating.

Talent and culture matter more than ever: "AI raises the floor for individuals, but the ceiling even more" (Russell Kaplan, Cognition). Your best people, with the right curious mindset, will be even more powerful this year.

Innovation needs a new operating model: Top-down annual roadmaps cannot match technological pace. Eric Burns (Anthropic): "Product strategy will flip to feeding fleets of agents problems as fast as you can define them." The solution: 'smaller teams with deep customer intimacy, empowered to drive innovation' (Mark Moffat, IFS).

The SaaS expansion: we have a significant opportunity to progress from supporting workflow to delivering tasks, and providing the platforms where agentic automation gets delivered.

A new leadership imperative. The technology is ready - the real challenge is leading an organisation through this transformation (Chris Bayne, Access). Change management is tough - but the prize is ever-increasing acceleration as underlying models keep improving.

The Hg portfolio scaled the impact we're seeing from AI by 5x since our previous summit last year, delivering material value acceleration. Still, it's hard not to come away feeling that much more will be possible this coming year.

The momentum continues to build.