Innovation Spotlight: Streamline M&A workflows with enterprise AI and Datasite Connect

Call it ‘the dealmaker’s dilemma’.

You’re equipped with the most powerful new tool for a generation. AI is accelerating workloads right across your company, from research to analysis to content creation.

And yet, for your most important work, it’s sidelined. Because your approved AI sits outside the secure space where the actual deal gets done. Here’s your hard choice. Either move deal documents outside the data room, or limit how much you can use the AI.

At best, you face a lot of switching between different platforms.

But what if the AI assistant you already use could plug directly into all your deals – while keeping the exact same security? Welcome to Datasite Connect.

AI outside, deal data inside?

Deal materials should never leave the data room. That’s the whole point. What’s more, the data room includes a rigorous structure of tasks, roles, and permissions. Taking documents outside to work on them with AI can undo all that careful preparation – as well as risking security.

Much of your team’s time is probably spent gathering information. And a lot of time is also spent on manual due diligence work. Typically, these take place in two disconnected environments. Switching between them is a friction point. For one deal, that might not seem too much trouble.

You can connect any individual deal to your AI assistant using Datasite MCP. But you need to do this on a project-by-project basis. In reality, your deal team won’t be working just one transaction at a time. Corp dev teams may be weighing up multiple acquisitions. Investment bankers will be moving between mandates, and so on. You might need to reinvent the way you use AI every time. As deal activity increases, that friction scales up in proportion.

The catch-all solution is Datasite Connect.

Bring your favorite AI inside every deal

Using Connect, you can bring your AI inside the data room for every deal. It enables you to keep using your company’s approved assistant (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot) as you work on deal materials. Crucially, it maintains all existing roles, permissions, and project boundaries. In short, your AI won’t be able to see (or draw data from) any document that you as a user can’t access. And because it’s across all deals, the friction is now eliminated.

The upshot is that you spend far less time recreating how AI fits into your workflow. And on the scale of an organization, you can extend an existing enterprise AI strategy into more of your deal activity. So you end up reaping far more value from the AI investment that you’ve already made.

Move faster from insight to action

Finding answers is good. Doing something with them is even better.

With Connect, you’re no longer flip-flopping between your ‘information’ and your ‘diligence’ environment. They’re the same secure space. So insight and action can now be joined at the hip.

You can now ask natural-language questions about any deal content (provided you have the right permissions), and your assistant answers them. It’s the same AI chat you’re familiar with, with the crucial bonus that every single answer is sourced and referenced from data room content, so you can verify it manually.

It’s invaluable if (for example) you have to hunt for information across a large document set. But Connect goes way beyond search and analysis.

It’s also possible to use natural-language instructions to initiate Datasite workflows directly from your AI assistant. So you can go in moments from what you know, to what you need to do.

Put the focus on human decisions

With all the talk about ‘AI replacing humans’, it’s worth highlighting what’s actually happening here. AI is applied to the tasks that humans may not be so good at – filtering vast volumes of information at speed – to unlock more time for them to focus on what only they can do: making decisions.

Because dealmaking decisions are about much more than fast answers. Whether it’s reviewing contracts, responding to buyer questions, or anything else, it’s vital to know the substance behind each answer.

The question isn’t, ‘What does the AI say?’ The question is, ‘What does the evidence in this deal tell us?’

By making that evidence easier to find, with fully sourced AI responses, Connect enables you to act not just fast, but with full confidence.

Create a single AI dealmaking experience

Organizations that have already invested in AI will shudder at the idea of having to change everything yet again. With Connect, they don’t need to. Now an approved enterprise AI setup can pivot to work in the specialized, high-value workflows of M&A.

Without a direct connection to the deal, an organization may have to add more point solutions, more workflows, and more governance processes simply to bring their AI into transaction work. None of that is necessary with Connect.

It’s about much more than simply giving AI secure access to the deal documents. It connects your AI to the content, evidence, workflows, and controls that make up the whole transaction. There’s even a portal where account admins can manage team access, usage, and credits.

The result? You get to continue working on deals in your preferred way – just faster, more productively, and more confidently.