Transcript: Datasite MCP for Claude

Doug Cullen (00:00)

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to those joining us from all around the world. Thank you all for coming and attending the first in an incredible series of webinars that we have. This is particularly focused on the Datasite MCP for Claude. It's the first in our series, so please join us for the remaining parts over the next couple of weeks. My name is Doug Cullen. I'm Chief Strategy Officer here at Datasite. I have been in the dealmaking ecosystem for a couple of decades, and I think right now is the most exciting time.

I also oversee corporate development for us and joined through the acquisition of Blueflame about a year ago, where Alice works for us. Before we get too far into the conversation, I just wanted to cover a few quick housekeeping items. First of all, we want to hear from you. There is a question button there, so please ask questions throughout the webinar. We will leave some time at the end of the presentation to cover these questions, and we really want to hear from the dealmakers about what you want to know about MCP, specifically MCP for Claude. Tell us what you think via our survey.

As I said, this is one of the new series. This is something of interest to dealmakers around the world, and we want to do a lot more of these types of series. There are additional resources located in the console, including a couple of different documents about MCP, Datasite, and maybe Blueflame as well. Please check those out. And of course, just so you know, the session will be recorded and available on demand. If your colleagues didn't get a chance to join us live, please forward it around and encourage people to take advantage of these new capabilities.

Any webinar would not be the same without a quick legal disclaimer. As a reminder, all opinions expressed are our own and do not necessarily reflect those of, or those endorsed by, Datasite or Blueflame. So with that, let's get to the program. Alice, welcome. Alice Esmerian is a product strategist and is currently with Blueflame AI. I would love to get a little bit of background about you, Alice. How long have you been at Blueflame? What were you doing before you joined Blueflame?

Alice Esmerian (02:25)

I've been with Blueflame for six months now, so it has definitely been a very exciting time to be part of this AI ecosystem. Before that, I was in investment banking and private equity for eight years, so it's great to have the opportunity to bring my past-life experiences into this AI ecosystem.

Doug Cullen (02:45)

Yeah. That is super important. We're trying to bring our practitioners to the forefront, which is very important to how we think about dealmaking. We do think about it both as a set of technologists and as people who have been there and done that throughout our careers.

And so we're going to be trying to bring some of that to life to inspire you as dealmakers on how to take advantage of this next set of technologies. But with that, let's take a step back, and then we will get into the demonstrations. Let's think a little bit about how you have been reflecting on your journey at Blueflame. How have some of the technologies really started to change the way you think about how dealmaking gets done today and into the future?

Alice Esmerian (03:36)

It has been really exciting to picture our customers experimenting with AI and bringing more and more technology into almost every workflow in the life cycle.

For us, seeing people want to make AI very useful, practical, and easy to use, while also maintaining total compliance and governance within their systems, has been such an interesting question. Really, the future of AI within dealmaking is going to be about how you can prompt-drive a lot of what you do while maintaining absolute safety and governance within your systems.

Doug Cullen (04:11)

Yeah. It is really a fascinating time for us. We actually launched our first MCP partners to Datasite. For those of you who are familiar with Datasite, we have been a bit of a closed ecosystem for a long time, and we felt like we had a massive opportunity at DealMAX to launch our first MCP server, connecting out to various different LLMs.

Within that, we did some videos with Raj, the founder of Blueflame, and he introduced this concept of a prompt-first dealmaker. How do you think dealmaking has evolved, and what does a prompt-first dealmaker mean to you?

Alice Esmerian (04:55)

Well, that's really interesting. Honestly, this MCP availability for Datasite is really powering all our users to interact with their data rooms and bring together the content and the preparation of their deals from a single prompt. We'll be looking into it today within more practical workflows. There are a lot of use cases that will apply to this MCP.

We'll cover a few of them. We've built a lot of skills and gathered context for our users to use from the easiest prompt possible. But yes, it is really changing things, and a lot of tasks that were very manual and time-consuming are going to be accelerated significantly, leaving a lot more time for the really interesting parts of the job. Overall, it's very exciting.

Doug Cullen (05:45)

Yeah. I think one of the ways we talk about it is that MCP gives us this opportunity to introduce a layer of governance. I know not everyone gets excited about talking about governance, but one of the things we think is paramount to effective dealmaking is the opportunity to leverage and build on the trust that a brand like Datasite has in the market.

We want to make sure that we're maintaining permissions throughout, building on that framework of confidentiality, and extending it to the point of creating an audit trail and, ultimately, confidence for dealmakers, because people certainly entrust us with some of the largest deals around the world. So we wanted to make sure that people around the world knew that, as we extend our Datasite ecosystem to providers via MCP, we think it is super important to do so in a governed and risk-compliant way.

Alice Esmerian (06:49)

Sorry. And that's exactly where Blueflame AI really brings this value.

We know that Datasite customers choose Datasite every single day because they want their data in a very secure environment. Having Blueflame query this content and this context is the optimal way to maintain all of these security layers, traceability, and auditability. We'll get into that in our demo, but that is the best way to bridge between an LLM provider and Datasite content by bringing Blueflame into the equation.

Doug Cullen (07:19)

Yeah. And that's where Blueflame, for us, acts as this layer, as Alice is saying, between the Datasite data room content and the LLMs.

This is important because one of the things that we loved about Blueflame is the primary focus on dealmaking. We really believe that is a secret ingredient to great prompt-first dealmaking moving forward. But with that, in the spirit of showing rather than just talking, why don't we get right into some of the demonstrations?

Alice Esmerian (07:54)

Sure.

Doug Cullen (07:57)

And of course, we're doing this live, so hopefully everything will go well. Why don't we pull up some of this?

You're going to open up Claude. It has MCP access to Datasite and to connected systems. One of the things I think is really critical is when you get this huge volume of content, no matter where you are, and you're thinking about initiating and setting up a data room from the very beginning. Can you walk us through some of the power that Claude brings with that Blueflame layer and ultimate connectivity to Datasite?

Alice Esmerian (08:32)

Totally. Here, we're already connected, and now we're just going to show you four workflows.

There are obviously a lot more examples of use cases you could use by leveraging Blueflame into your data room through your MCP connectors. Feel free to ask questions in the Q&A if there are any workflows that you would like us to discuss. We'll review all of that, and it's very helpful for us. I connected my Datasite here through MCP connectors, which you can see at the bottom from the plus button. I also enabled Blueflame, which is going to be able to enter the content of all my Datasite files and really absorb and reason around the content of these documents, which is where the real value stands.

The first workflow is when you set up your data room. You're already in a smart environment where the agent automatically asks you a few questions to understand the context of your transaction. It is going to ask you what type of deal it is, what industry the deal covers, the size, and where the data is hosted in terms of geography. That automatically prepares your deal in the Datasite environment, and the model will come back with a suggested index. This is something that we have shipped within eight skills that cover eight different steps of the workflows, and we've really tailored them to our audience because we understand the pain of some Datasite and data room interactions.

This really accelerates that. Here, for example, I have a suggested index that covers 12 sections. Once I've reviewed that, I can provide simple feedback. In this particular case, I wanted to remove a section and a subsection. The model understands my feedback and, once I've approved it, will push that into my Datasite environment. Here it is: my Project Angel is live, and 155 subfolders have been created. It's crazy to think that this was just done in a few seconds. Before that, when I was a banker, I would have had to create all these folders manually and make sure there were no typos and that all the names were consistent across the 12 sections.

This is now completely accelerated. You just need to come back with your comments and your reorganization, and this is all set for you.

Doug Cullen (10:55)

Yeah. So just to take a slight step back, and we've accelerated this a bit for the purposes of the webinar, we are listed as a connector within the Claude ecosystem. If you have a Datasite login and if you have the availability on your Claude Desktop or Claude application, you can connect right into Datasite. One thing to note is that we are always respecting the permissions that you have in terms of accessing your files.

As you're seeing, we're opening up the ability to create a Datasite directly from your Claude environment. The other thing of note is that we will be talking about things at a slightly different level, because this data room that we have, or that Datasite has, has really been created with AI-empowered content that is highly processed and available via the Blueflame AI Assistant. Some of the things you're seeing here may or may not be available on your project, but we're trying to paint a picture of availability. I think this is so powerful because, as Alice was saying, if you had to do this previously, maybe you had the folders or maybe you had an Excel file with the folders, but now you're really able to do this.

We're able to do this specific to the type of deal, transaction type, and/or industry to power some pretty amazing things. I think the next thing you're going to do is work with these folders up there. We've created the index. What are some of the other things that you may have been doing as a banker over long weekends, or perhaps late at night, in preparation for getting this Datasite or data room set up?

Alice Esmerian (12:38)

So the next step in your workflow is typically that you have your data room set up and you're going to start wanting to incorporate documents.

Most of them you receive from your client. And the client, let's just say, is not going to spend a ton of time making sure that naming conventions are respected, that any scanned document doesn't read as Scan 002, and so on. Having a very clean pass at renaming all your files is something that is cumbersome yet extremely necessary. Obviously, it requires you to open every file and make sure the name ties to the right year and the right quarter. That's complicated. Now, by enabling this AI into your data room, the system is going to be able to first get a first pass at making sure that all the years and dates are being applied consistently.

When you're referring to the company name, it is always referring to it with the same spelling and wording. You're going to have the ability to flag any duplicate names, etc. Here you can see how the model went through and, just by reading the file names, suggested changes to each of them. However, as you pointed out, this is not leveraging any of the content within the files. This is just cleaning up existing file names. What you really want me to do, to replicate what you would have done as an analyst or as someone working on the deal, is to look into the content of these files so that it can intelligently provide guidance regarding the renaming.

I put here a use case that I think speaks quite well to the capabilities. I wanted all my contracts to have the same structure: the name of the party that signed the contract and the year in which the contract was signed, which is not readable from just a simple document name. Blueflame AI is enabled. It will safely go into your Datasite, read all the information, with no document or information ever leaving your Datasite ecosystem, and then reason with this data about where your contracts are.

What are they? Are they employee contracts, MSAs, or vendor agreements? And how do I rename these so that they're consistently labeled? In just a few seconds and with just a few prompts, you can see here that the model batched them by contract type and renamed everything, and I just need to agree with that and it's done.

Doug Cullen (15:03)

I mean, this is not to be overstated in terms of the power that something like Blueflame and Claude bring together in this great marriage, because I've been in many a data room throughout my life.

I'm sure we've all encountered data rooms that have poorly named folders. And then once you get inside the folders, you get even more poorly named folders. Then maybe you get subsets of documents that aren't properly named either. How many "IB Book 08.xls" files have I had to click into and look at in order to figure out what year this is from a financial operating perspective? Here, you're demonstrating such a valuable light touch in terms of saying, let's make sure there is consistency in how this document is named. But we're going one layer deeper in value and presentation, looking into the content itself, extracting key components like the type of legal document and ultimately the year.

I think that both accelerates the setup of the data room, and I can also imagine, since you've been on the buy-side a lot, what some of your experiences have been in trying to sift through massive amounts of content in order to find the information that you need to get going.

Alice Esmerian (16:26)

Yeah, absolutely. Really, having this ability to enter a space as a buyer and reviewer and automatically see the level of care that has been put in place, and the work that has been done by the banker and their team to create the best buying experience, is already setting you up for a successful process.

I feel that this is value-added for the person who is going to have more time to think about deal prep and the content of the data room rather than being stuck in the nitty-gritty. But also, as you pointed out, from the buyer's standpoint, entering a space that feels organized and clean, where you can easily identify the data you want, the year you want, and the name of a particular customer or vendor that is clearly labeled in a contract, is already setting you up for success.

Doug Cullen (17:16)

So that's a great value, and I always think that the quality of the organization, and the quality of the data room, is a reflection of the quality of the process and ultimately the underlying asset.

So I think, from the preparation side, on the sell-side, it's super important to understand the documents. LLMs are very good at helping us do that, and Blueflame is even better at organizing the content in a very digestible way, allowing you to really get to what you're looking to accomplish in a deal, which is typically looking to understand the underlying asset. Is this something that is consistent with your investment thesis? Is this something that is additive to your corporate portfolio? You're really trying to get through that initial phase of diligence in order to figure out whether this is something you want to move forward with.

But on that side, I think the next thing we're going to talk a little bit about is Q&A, one of the most painstaking parts of the process. What are some of the things you've been able to leverage via MCP and Blueflame to make Q&A more seamless, effective, and efficient?

Alice Esmerian (18:32)

I wouldn't say a little bit more; I would say immensely more. With Blueflame enabled, having access to all this content being aggregated, reasoned upon, and queried in an unlimited way is super helpful.

As a banker or someone preparing a data room, you're going to be able to track the information requests and whether the information has been provided or not. You're also going to be able to populate questions, whether they're from your vendor diligence providers before launching your process or further down the road as you start receiving unstructured questions from different buyers and all their advisors. It's all flowing through email. It's hard to really track. For each of these, you have someone from the sell-side team prepopulating draft responses, then going to the management team for sign-off. That's a long process, and here you can submit your question to the LLM.

Because Blueflame is layered in with all these skills that we're bringing together, it knows how to respect a banker tone, knows where to locate information, and knows how to provide the right source and level of confidence to the reviewer. Obviously, everything we're showing here is not replacing any human work. It's more about enabling and empowering our users to have this layer of human review and human overarching view that is just accelerated and simplified. Here, the example we're looking at is uploading a Q&A tracker, but that could also be a data request list, or DRL.

Everyone has different references, but you feed in an unstructured set of requests and the model understands what they are and what it is supposed to do. It organizes them here and sets them up by workflows: legal, tax, technology, etc. It found the right information within all the content of your VDR and then prepopulated responses and sources. One thing I'm very adamant about is zero hallucination. The skills really prompt the model to be highly transparent about its ability to respond to a certain question. You can see here that of my 72 questions, the model clearly tells me that it is confident about 51 of these.

For 20 of these, it's partial, and for one of them, it couldn't answer. You then have the option to review that, whether it's in an Excel tracker or a dashboard. Here, when I open my dashboard, I have all my questions with their level of confidence from the LLM. As a banker, I can jump into this where the lowest level of confidence is. When I open it, I have the draft response leveraging, in this case, an ARR bridge. It leverages the customer revenue cube and the financial data, and all my sources with the VDR index. It's an immense time-saver.

You can just cross-check the information, check that the document reference is right, and you have the first pass of responses for all your Q&A. So that's a massive time-saver.

Doug Cullen (21:36)

And I don't have to tell you this, but this is probably one of the most crucial parts of the process because we've got these questions, whether you're on the buy-side seeking answers from the sell-side banker or a different advisor sitting in the middle. You're doing your best to involve all the subject matter experts around the organization in order to answer this. With this capability, you're able to query the content itself, the content gets cited, and you're putting together a confidence score based on that.

So you're really taking potentially 500 or 600 prospective questions and narrowing in on the ones that probably need a little bit of extra attention. I've also heard bankers really doing this preliminarily to get familiar with the content, almost running this as a simulation: what customer questions do we anticipate will come? They're getting familiar with that content and almost preemptively looking at what queries may be coming up to get even more prepared.

Alice Esmerian (22:37)

Yeah, which is a great transition to our last workflow that we'll be showing you today. We did the prelaunch readiness.

This is something that we felt, as old practitioners, would have been really helpful when you're about to push live on your data room. You always have this moment of stress and anxiety, thinking, "Is there anything that actually doesn't tie out? Is there a document that is corrupted? Is there any information that shouldn't be there?" So we packaged this skill that we call prelaunch readiness, which will cover three main elements. The first one is a gap analysis. For each section, it is going to have a sort of reference and know if you might be a bit light on some topic.

That will prompt buyers to immediately react with information and additional requests, so that's being looked at. The second one is document quality. It will look for any corrupted document, any blank scan, any unsigned contract, and more importantly, any PII information that has not been redacted and is available in your data room. The last section is a risk review. We put together a list of potential risks for tax, finance, tech, IP, etc. The model and Blueflame are going to look at your content and cross-check any of these risks and assets.

Is there anything that is going to prompt the buyer to think about the potential for the assets you're presenting? All of that is treated and then available in a Word document where you can see the overall context of your project, the model's recommendation, and each section where it sees the most need for attention. I think that, as an old practitioner, this would have given me an extra layer of comfort. It's like having an extra person in the room, an extra pair of eyes that gives you confidence in the last mile before pressing publish.

So I think this is another great way of leveraging Blueflame within your data room.

Doug Cullen (24:38)

Yeah, very powerful. We've always talked about Datasite broadly as an extension of your deal team, and I don't think that has ever been more true than it is right now. Real quickly, and then we'll go into the Q&A, we've got some great questions here, so I'll be able to get to hopefully a few of them. Can you just quickly cover, Alice, the difference between maybe a connector and a skill?

We've also taken the liberty of publishing specific dealmaking skills into the Claude environment. Can you quickly cover the difference between connectors and skills, and where can people find the skills if they're looking for them?

Alice Esmerian (25:15)

Absolutely. The way this works is that whichever LLM you're connecting your MCP into, you will rely on it to have access to this indexing and names and then do the reasoning. When you enable Blueflame within your VDR, Blueflame is going to do the work of reading the content and analyzing all of this content.

When you add the skills on top of that, you're really providing guidance as to how each workflow should be processed. You're removing any risk that your LLM will not read the information the way it should, and you're providing guidelines and guidance for the model to do it the way your firm, or you yourself, would expect it to be done. How we built these skills is really by thinking about buyers, the pitfalls you want to avoid, and the information you want to make sure is surfaced and triangulated together. That really adds additional value to your workflows.

Doug Cullen (26:11)

Yeah, awesome. The superpower is the connectivity between the data, the data room, and the MCP environment via Blueflame, as well as these skills. You can find these skills in our GitHub repository by searching for them. You can add those to your Claude environment, and that will give you the benefit of our dealmakers having prebuilt several of these based on some of our experience. Okay, we have a lot of questions and not as much time. The best question I had was: is there going to be availability of a recording from Jesse?

Yes, this is being recorded. It will be available. Please access it and pass it along. Let's propagate and help build more prompt-first dealmakers around the world. Okay, question: do you anticipate Datasite MCP for Claude being used outside of IBs, such as consulting companies being able to query a Datasite project for specific pieces of information?

Alice Esmerian (27:17)

Totally. We are fully cognizant that we don't want this to be just for our banker clients here.

This is going to be available to the reviewer side, so the buy-side and all of their advisors. As a banker, as you onboard more advisors or even your client, you'll also have the ability to give anyone who has access to a Datasite account and an LLM access to that.

Doug Cullen (27:41)

Yeah. So we are hyper-focused here on more of a sell-side workflow, but we will probably do some future programming around the buy-side. There are a lot of questions about what is available. There is a whole set of capabilities within your Claude connections environment that are available to you if you are on the buy-side or the sell-side, in other words, an administrator or a reviewer.

So you can see that again. One important thing to understand is that the project itself must have the Blueflame AI Assistant enabled, which is something that the sell-side would set up in order to extend a lot of the powerful search capabilities and be able to look into the documents there. We don't have a ton of time to talk about that, so I encourage you to reach out to Datasite via any of our channels and we can walk you through it in great detail. Or maybe I'll do some follow-on content around that. But this is sell-side focused. Just to avoid any doubt here, 88% of the viewers of Datasite are reviewers.

So we have a lot of familiarity with these workflows across the entire dealmaking community. This webinar happens to be sell-side focused, but let me see if I can blast through one more question. Let's see. Let's just go back. Does batch-uploading question lists by function or other segmentation yield better responses by managing context?

Alice Esmerian (29:21)

I haven't tested that, but I don't expect it would. In any case, whether you batch-submit your questions, or just the tech ones, the LLM and Blueflame will always make sure that there isn't any other document or information available in a section that is not specifically labeled technology.

So it is going to do the work of almost scrubbing every single piece of information for any question. I don't anticipate it would necessarily get you better outcomes, although it might accelerate the timing.

Doug Cullen (29:53)

Yeah. And I would just offer as well that one of the powerful things here is that these are probably the worst these models will ever be in terms of our ability to interact with and connect to Datasite. So I anticipate a lot of additional functionality and capabilities developing. We think context is super relevant, and we also feel that Datasite is at the center of really understanding these workflows as well as anyone out there.

So with that, we're at time. Thank you for joining us. This is our first in a series of webinars, and I think we've got a couple of other programs coming. Check out the recording. Make sure that you become a prompt-first dealmaker. We certainly aspire to be prompt-first dealmakers. We've been utilizing these capabilities ourselves, and I'm amazed every day by how much better things get. Make sure you understand that this is a true leapfrog. We think the models are very accessible, and the conduit within Datasite makes sure it is secure, compliant, and remains auditable.

Hopefully, we've earned your trust through the years, and we certainly want to maintain that moving forward. Alice, I want to thank you for joining us and bringing to light some of the capabilities. Of course, thank you to those around the world who joined us for this webinar. We've got a little bit of an announcement at the bottom around upcoming webinars. I think the next one will focus on a different frontier model, but a lot of the content will be somewhat similar. We'll try to learn and hopefully make sure we're giving you what you want out there.

Thank you for joining us in the next level of dealmaking. Thank you, Alice, and we look forward to seeing you on the next webinar. Thanks, everyone.