The question allocators have started asking.

In 2025 AIMA surveyed alternative-investment managers and their investors on generative AI. Two numbers stand out. Ninety-five percent of fund managers now use it somewhere in the business. And 29% of allocators already include specific AI questions in their due-diligence questionnaires, with another 29% expecting to add them within the year.

Taken together: nearly everyone is using AI, and soon a majority of institutional investors will ask, in writing, how. Which tools. Under what terms. Touching which data. Governed by whom.

At most funds the honest answer is currently unwritten. Analysts use what they use; somewhere there is a policy memo; the two are not the same document. That gap is survivable in a pitch meeting and uncomfortable in an ODD review, where the operational answer is the product.

A good answer turns out to be short. An approved set of tools, chosen on purpose. Terms with providers settled at the level of retention and training, in writing. A clear account of which documents may enter which systems. And a named person responsible for all of it. Funds that can produce that paragraph tend to find the question an easy one — and the asking of it, increasingly, an advantage.