What We Heard at SuperReturn Berlin 2026

For four days during SuperReturn International 2026 in Berlin, Bell & Holmes and Future Standard co-hosted an open networking lounge next to the conference venue. The idea was simple: create a place where investors, advisors, operators and consultants could step away from the conference floor and continue the conversations that panels and meeting schedules rarely leave enough time for.

The pop-up space filled with private equity investors, advisors, portfolio company operators and consultants from across the globe, mainly Europe and North America. The deals and sectors people brought up varied widely, but a handful of themes came up often enough to be worth writing down.

AI has moved from curiosity to execution

Nobody is still asking whether to adopt AI. The questions have shifted to which businesses are actually building durable productivity gains from it, and how investors should price that into the next ownership cycle.

Several people said AI has crossed from thematic discussion into underwriting input. A point made more than once: the gap between firms running pilots and firms that have meaningfully changed how work gets done is wider than the press coverage suggests.

Primary research is doing more work, not less

A counter-intuitive thread, given how much money has flowed into data platforms and analytical AI: the appetite for direct conversations with customers, suppliers and ex-employees has gone up, not down. Several investors made the same point in different words. The easier it gets to generate plausible-looking analysis, the more weight a verified human source carries. That matches what we see across our own commercial due diligence and strategy work.

The hard part is sorting the signal

Information abundance is no longer the constraint. The constraint is reliability. We heard repeated references to source verification, sample design and the discipline of knowing which data points actually move the investment thesis. The investors who sounded most confident about their process spent the most time talking about what they choose not to use.

Deals still get done over a coffee

The least surprising observation of the week, and the one almost everyone made. For all the talk of platforms and pipelines, every introduction made in our lounge happened because one person walked over to another. Conferences like SuperReturn are useful because they compress that into four days.

Thank you to everyone who stopped by

As the first event co-hosted by Bell & Holmes and Future Standard, the week delivered exactly what we had hoped for: thoughtful conversations, new introductions and relationships worth continuing beyond the conference. We look forward to building on many of those discussions in the months ahead.

𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐁𝐞𝐥𝐥 & 𝐇𝐨𝐥𝐦𝐞𝐬

Bell & Holmes is a global primary research partner supporting private equity investors, consultancies and corporate strategy teams with interview-led market intelligence, commercial due diligence and decision-focused research.

𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐅𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐫𝐝

Future Standard is a global alternative asset manager serving institutional and private wealth clients, investing across private equity, credit, real estate and infrastructure in the middle market. With a 30+ year track record of value creation and $94 billion in assets under management, we back the business owners and financial sponsors that drive growth.