A few years back, an LP investing in mid-market PE asked me a question on a Zoom call that seemed innocuous at the time. He said: “How does an Operating Partner actually scale? You’re one person. You can’t sit in eight management meetings a week.” I gave him the then-standard answer – prioritization, frameworks, repeatable playbooks, standardized outputs, the right cadence with portco CEOs… blah, blah, blah. He nodded politely. Neither of us was satisfied.

That question has been sitting in the back of my mind. It certainly was reasonable for a guy in his role to pose. It made me uncomfortable that the answers weren’t really more than platitudes. Weirdly last week on an entirely different topic, I think PitchBook just answered it, accidentally, in a 42-page research note about something else entirely.

Their Q2 2026 analyst note, Mapping the AI Super-Cycle, maps a 25-layer technology stack and lays out a thesis that the basic unit of economic production is shifting from billable hours to guaranteed outcomes. Fine. We’ve been writing about that here for a while. But buried at the top of the stack is a concept they call the Individual as a Platform: “IaP” for short. They forecast the IaP era arriving in 2028.

Here’s how they describe it: a single human professional, scaling impact exponentially by orchestrating fleets of agents. Market value determined not by personal execution speed, but by orchestration capacity. The human is no longer the executor. The human is the conductor. Their words: “the IaP model does not scale the human; it scales the human’s intent.”  

It’s like the advent of the forward pass; my words, not theirs.

Now, consider that dynamic with an Operating Partner in mind.

It’s the Job You Already Have

An Operating Partner at a mid-market PE firm sits across eight, ten, sometimes twelve portfolio companies. She doesn’t run any of them. She doesn’t bill hours. She isn’t paid by the hour for time-on-task. She is paid for outcomes… carry, MOIC, the eventual exit. Her value is judgment compounded across a portfolio she does not personally operate.

She orchestrates. She doesn’t execute.

The OP role has been selling Work-as-a-Service (WaaS) since long before anyone (at PitchBook) gave it a name. Multiple clients. Outcome-based compensation. Scale through delegated execution, not personal throughput. Proprietary pattern recognition built across companies and cycles. The kind of “business logic” that PitchBook says will be the defining moat of the next decade.

Coincidentally for us, PitchBook is describing the future state of professional work using language that already describes the OP role. They just don’t know it, because their analysts cover capital flows, not the humans inside PE firms who actually do the work of value creation. 

Here is where it gets interesting. If PitchBook is right, and I think they directionally are, the IaP model across all industries goes mainstream by 2028. Lawyers, accountants, consultants, and yes, executives, all start operating as one-person platforms with fleets of agents handling execution while they handle judgment and relationships.

That has two implications for the Operating Partner role, and they cut in opposite directions.

First, the OP becomes more leveraged. If a single OP today can credibly support eight portfolio companies, what happens when she has a fleet of agents handling diligence prep, board materials, KPI tracking, talent benchmarking, and first-pass strategic analysis? The number is no longer eight. It might be twenty. It might be a fund of one.

Second, the moat shifts. If the execution layer collapses, what’s left is the human layer — the trust, the pattern recognition, the relationships with CEOs that took twenty years to build. The OPs who win are the ones who already had the human moat before agents made execution cheap. The OPs who were really just glorified analysts — well, the agents do that part now.

Is AI coming for the “2”?

If outcome-based pricing kills the billable hour in law and consulting, and we simultaneously get force multiplier productivity from the OPs inside the tent at the PE firm, what does it ultimately do to 2-and-20?

PitchBook stays politely on the side of “enterprise transformation” and doesn’t turn the lens on its own readers. But the logic doesn’t really stop at portfolio companies, does it? If a single OP can credibly drive value across a portfolio three times the size of today’s, the comp structure has to give, doesn’t it? 

I don’t have the answer to that one. Neither does the industry. But the firms that figure it out first are going to look very different from the firms that don’t.

The Inflection

Walk into any PE firm today and ask how they evaluate Operating Partner candidates. The answer will be some version of: deep functional expertise, prior CEO or COO seat, specific industry exposure, cultural fit with the deal team. All true. All necessary.

Now ask: how do you evaluate a candidate’s capacity to orchestrate? To direct fleets of agents? To compound judgment across more companies than any one human could ever sit with personally? (And it’s not just OPs. CEO search committees are going to be asking that very same question as they make their selections.)

You’ll get blank stares. Not because the question is wrong. Because it’s two years early.

Two years isn’t long. The OPs and the firms that start asking it now will own the next cycle. The ones still hiring for the last cycle will spend the next decade explaining why their portfolio companies kept getting outpaced by their competitors.