Transcript: Datasite MCP for Copilot

Doug Cullen (00:00)

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to those joining us from all around the world today. Welcome to the Datasite MCP for Microsoft Copilot webinar. This is the third in our series. All the other sessions are available on demand, so please go ahead and check those out if you are interested in either Claude as a surface for interrogation or ChatGPT as a surface for interrogation. Today, we're here to talk about Copilot, Microsoft Copilot to be specific. My name is Doug Cullen. I'm Chief Strategy Officer here at Datasite. I also oversee corporate development, and I've had my hands in most of the acquisitions that we've done over my last decade-plus here with Datasite.

I'm here to introduce today's topic, which is really about framing how deal teams can work with AI tools like Copilot while keeping sensitive deal content protected inside governed environments. Before I kick things off and introduce my co-presenter in today's webinar, I just wanted to remind people around the world about a few housekeeping items. First of all, we want to hear from you. There is an ability to ask a question on the panel, so please ask your questions. We hope to have about five minutes toward the end of the discussion to address them.

We want to get to your questions, whatever you have, from all around the world. The other thing is that we're going to send a survey. We'd love to know what you think about this program and past programs, and to hear areas for improvement. We are always in a continuous improvement environment here at Datasite. We want to make sure that we are giving you what is valuable. Speaking of what we hope is valuable, there are a bunch of additional resources in the console, including some FAQs and guides along the way to help you on your AI journey specific to MCP for Copilot.

Just like the previous sessions, this will be available on demand, so please forward it to your colleagues and ask for additional access. We'd love the world to understand what we're doing here at Datasite, and specifically how we're powering up Microsoft Copilot via our MCP connection. And the quick legal disclaimer: all opinions expressed are our own and not those of Datasite. So with those behind us, I would like to introduce my friend and colleague, Caitlin Murdy. Caitlin, you're VP of Sales Engineering here at Datasite. How long have you been with us? What do you tend to focus on? Help our customers understand.

Caitlin Murdy (02:57)

Yeah. Hello, everyone. Like Doug said, I'm Caitlin Murdy. I run our sales engineering team. I have been with Datasite for six years now. I've seen Datasite over the transition of the past six years, bringing new products to market, working closely with our product team and our sales team to bring those products to market, receive client feedback, bringing it back in, and continuing to evolve what we offer.

Doug Cullen (03:22)

Yeah, so Caitlin and her team, we've got a global team that does this as well, sort of sit as a linchpin between our customers, our go-to-market teams, our service teams, and our product teams.

You've been a great partner helping us build what we think are pretty amazing products over the year. Thank you for that. I think we want to transition a little bit, and it should be stated, just to give people context, that we are currently in process with Microsoft to get this capability approved. So we have the capability, and we're going to be able to showcase that capability. I'd love to be able to tell you that you can go and find this capability immediately, and sadly that's not totally the case. We're going to get a little bit of a foreshadowing of what will come.

We're really more in a production environment that's available for internal folks here at Datasite to at least be able to get a sense of directionally where we're heading with this capability. Don't drive yourself crazy if you continue to look for this as we're going through the final stages of approval by our dear friends at Microsoft. With that as a backdrop, I just wanted to talk a little bit about the overall dynamics that are happening across dealmaking, as we covered in the other sessions. AI is omnipresent, and it's really changing some of the ways that we tend to think about how dealmaking is getting done today, how it's going to get done tomorrow, and what tools people have at their disposal.

So I guess from your perspective, Caitlin, before we dive into the nitty-gritty of some of the demonstrations, what are some of the industry trends you're seeing? You're out on sales calls, you're showcasing some of these capabilities to customers all over the place, across corporate development, private equity, and investment banking. What are some of the backdrops or points that you're hearing over and over again about industry dynamics?

Caitlin Murdy (05:23)

Yeah, I think over the course of the past year, there has been this big transition from people being very scared of AI to people feeling that they need to adopt it.

They have to figure out what tools to use, but they are still getting more and more comfortable. Every month that goes by, I think we see more and more teams adopting tools. But there has definitely been an underlying tone of which tool to use, as you have people who really want to use Claude and then all of a sudden ChatGPT gets ahead with something else. So there is this ever-changing dynamic going on, and it's tough for teams to decide which tools to use and where to commit.

Doug Cullen (06:02)

Yeah. Just as a refresh, a lot of these capabilities that we're showcasing today are very new to market.

We actually launched the MCP connections at DealMAX earlier this month and brought out the first ever kind of Blueflame-enabled AI Assistant within Diligence and Acquire. Those are some foundational elements. I think one of the things that I find fascinating has been some conversations that we've had along the way, and really this notion of prompt-first dealmaking. As you're saying, AI is certainly omnipresent. I think people are in various stages of their journey embracing AI, like many people around the world. Microsoft is omnipresent for a lot of us dealmakers as part of the critical software suite that we have at our disposal.

So I think Copilot is certainly an interesting addition to our set, but one of the things that we've been thinking about a lot is ensuring this level of governance and compliance. Can you give us some perspective from your side in terms of how we've been thinking about AI, how clients tend to think about AI, and how we approached it from a strategic standpoint in terms of activating within our various surfaces?

Caitlin Murdy (07:25)

Yeah, definitely. I think first and foremost, we are a security-first company.

We want to make sure we're doing right by our clients and protecting their data. Everything that we're rolling out is with that mindset. As we think about our MCP connectors into the data room, it's really to allow you to protect that content but leverage AI against it. Through my conversations with clients, I think that's, one, a gap in what they have available today because they don't have tools to leverage AI throughout the diligence process. And two, it's always one of the first questions we get around protecting their data. So I think that's super important.

I'll also say, because you mentioned Copilot and that's the theme of today, that Microsoft is ever-present for so many people. We get a lot of excitement around Copilot and what we're doing here because I think for a lot of clients we work with, Copilot is kind of their first foray into the AI world.

Doug Cullen (08:26)

Yeah, totally makes sense. I think what we're really trying to get to here is showcasing what AI can actually do securely within the data room. Today we're going to showcase the MCP integration with Copilot.

Then we'll talk a little bit about our Blueflame Assistant. This is active again; we've got it in ChatGPT, so you can find those as connectors. We're in the process of getting approval for Microsoft Copilot. With that, I thought it would make sense to level set across a couple of different areas that we're going to frame today. One of these is that you're going to hear me talk a little bit about the Blueflame AI Assistant. This is something that is available today for both our Diligence application and our Acquire application.

As a person running that process, whether as an advisor, the underlying corporate, or even a private equity company dealing with a potential divestiture or portfolio sale, you can elect to have the Blueflame AI Assistant enabled in your project. That's actually a side panel that's available today, and it will allow you to have a full agentic experience within the Diligence project. We'll be covering some of this on future programming, particularly around Blueflame and the abilities that we have via that MCP connection as well. But then you're also layering in this additional layer.

This is MCP, right? Think of MCP as a different surface, something that you can use. In this instance, we'll be talking about Copilot. We've got this surface that is actually connecting based upon your credentials. What you are authorized to do within the platform, what projects you have access to, and what you are able to do within that project will determine how this connector gives you this beautiful surface of Copilot, which gives you another way to act on the data room content. We'll showcase what those things are able to do. So we've got the Blueflame AI Assistant within the project experience.

You can go there and activate it. Then we have some customers who are seeking to do things outside of the traditional Datasite experience, and they want to be able to interact with content via MCP, which again we're going to showcase. You can do it within Datasite, and you can do it within MCP or Copilot. I just wanted to level set those two things. If you have any questions, please reach out to anyone at Datasite and we can talk with you about that. With that, let's get to the demonstration portion of it and talk a little bit about some practical examples.

Again, these are going to be more sell-side admin workflows. Caitlin is going to pull up her screen here, and we're just going to talk about this. Okay, let's scenario-plan here a little bit. I now want to set up a project. Can I actually do that from a surface like Copilot?

Caitlin Murdy (11:38)

You can. It's pretty incredible. A lot of the things that you used to have to log into the data room and do through our UI, we're now offering via the connector. Without further ado, I'll pull it up so you all can see it, and I'll call out as we go through.

Doug mentioned using the Blueflame AI Assistant to enable AI-powered search, understanding, and interaction with the content. I'll call that out in this first example, where you're just creating a new project that can be done via the MCP connector. I said, create a project title. It's Snowflower, Sunflower, I don't know what a snowflower is. What you can do through this is you'll see Copilot come back, and there is a level of detail that we need in order to create the project. Copilot knows that. It asks, it confirms, I give a quick free-text response with what is needed, and then my project is created as easily as that.

If I want to go in, it provides me with the link so I can quickly access it. It actually prompts me to say, do you want to create a folder structure? How do you want to build it out? Based on the data I've already provided, it then goes ahead and builds out my folder structure. I can obviously edit this later and alter it to be more specific to my process, but it does a first pass at that and builds out the in-depth folder structure that I'll need to leverage. Then I'm thinking about it: Doug is actually supporting me on this deal, so I want to make sure he's added to the project as well.

All I need to do is say, "Doug Cullen," and he's now added as a project admin. I specified his role. If I hadn't, it would prompt me with the different roles that are available and then ask me which one I want to provide to him. It's pretty cool and powerful what it can do when you think about having to log into the site and do those things through the tool. Now, if you're already working in Copilot, you can just continue working there and do exactly what you need.

Doug Cullen (13:47)

Yeah, an amazing thing for us. We have literally hundreds of thousands of users who access Datasite every single month across 28,000 companies.

A bunch of people are super sophisticated and experienced. They've done this a bunch of different times. Others may be doing it for the first time. One of the things that you're able to benefit from and draw some power from, if you will, is our collective experience having supported literally hundreds of thousands of transactions across the world. Here, you're basically able to create this folder structure. You can get these as templates within our core platform, but it's really going to create this dynamic folder structure. So you're already a step ahead. Maybe you had to ask a former colleague, "Hey, do you have a previous index?" Maybe you call our Project Pro Team.

They can do this. But right now you're able to do so much just out of this surface of Copilot that it's already, I think, game-changing.

Caitlin Murdy (14:43)

Definitely. And I think what's really cool too is the flexibility. If you know exactly the deal you're working on, you can describe the asset that you're selling and it'll get even more in-depth and particular to your deal. Or if you want to keep it vague, you can do that, but it gives you the flexibility to run it how you need.

Doug Cullen (15:01)

Yeah. Then you know what typically ends up happening before this. I get my folder structure, I start to organize, and I add the appropriate documents. If I'm the corporate, I'm doing that directly. Maybe I'm working with this as an investment banker, a lawyer, or, depending on where you are, maybe an advisor of some other sort. Then I think a really powerful thing is that usually you want to get a sense of how this is looking. Is the content logical? Is it connected to the right things?

Are there potential gaps? Is AI there for us to be able to get that type of insight?

Caitlin Murdy (15:37)

It is. It's pretty incredible. I think what you're describing, that kind of launch-ready checklist, can be one of the most tedious, time-consuming, nerve-wracking parts of the process. You have to make sure everything is ready to go, so the right buyers are getting access to the right things. Now you can leverage AI as that first pass.

In this case, it's leveraging Blueflame AI to analyze the content, understand what's in there, and determine where you have gaps. But it's also leveraging the regular MCP connector to look at things like whether things are published and who has access to what. In this case, I've asked it to run my prelaunch readiness scan. I love the visual traffic-light status it provides, so I can really easily see that my first folder looks ready to go. My other folder is not fully published, and I might want to look into that, or maybe it's intentional.

Then we dive deeper into Round 2, and I can see that, based on the AI scan, a lot of these folders have the right content in there. There aren't a lot of gaps, but where there are gaps or where things are missing, that's flagged for me to dig deeper into. Then it even goes ahead and gives the top five issues or fixes that I should make immediately. What I love about it, and with a lot of these prompts you'll see this, is that it really drives me to take action and points me toward what a viable next action is. I need to figure out my gaps in what's published and unpublished, or I need to rename specific files as it went through certain things in here.

They were not named with the broader naming structure. Or maybe there are some draft documents or things that look unfinished that I need to look into. The final thing I asked it to do as part of the readiness scan is start to anticipate what buyers might ask me. I want to get in front of what their questions are going to be. I want to understand if there are going to be any gotcha moments before I go live. It drafts all of that within here, linking obviously back to the data room, which I think is crucial too, and then provides a quick launch checklist.

Like I said, it's going to drive you to take action, which I think is super important in this situation.

Doug Cullen (17:54)

Yeah. So let's maybe take those a little bit one at a time and unpack them. First of all, we've got the Blueflame-enabled content. We're able to have the folder structure that we've established. We're then able to look into the content of the documents themselves and do a little bit of a compare and contrast against the content of the document.

Is that being represented by the name? I've supported quite a few deals in my life, but I can tell you that adding something like Scan 4000 is not very helpful, nor is Book 009.xls. If I'm on the buy side doing a review, it's very difficult to understand that. So I think this is a crucial element for those in that preparation phase. As a sell-side team, you want to make sure your house is tidy and in order. You've got a logical index, you've got the right documents in the right locations, and those documents are named properly in order to facilitate smooth diligence, right?

I think this ultimately is reflective of a high-quality asset. Most people, when they're looking at a platform like Datasite, are really dealing with the best of the best, and we're trying to layer in the best technology to aid you on the way. You mentioned that this is probably one of the most stressful times that a dealmaker has, that moment before launch. It is a proverbial measure-twice-and-cut-once moment. I've heard massive stories around managing directors literally reviewing every file in every folder before launch because they were ultimately representing this on behalf of the customer.

I've heard of general counsels at corporates literally going through every file. I've seen controllers going through every single financial disclosure in order to tick and tie this. I'm not saying that you don't want to look at that, but this is where AI can be super powerful in terms of helping us connect those dots.

Caitlin Murdy (19:59)

Exactly. That's what it is. It's almost an extra layer of eyes on what you're doing so you can feel more confident in what you're doing and what you're executing. To your point on file renaming, as we went through that checklist, we saw that some of the files were not to the consistent naming standard.

As you said, on deals, when you're looking through and trying to find content and it's named incorrectly, that's going to slow down your deal. On one hand, AI is helping the admin craft and do all of this quicker, but on the other hand, it's helping the buy-side because you're finding a better-formatted data room, so you can go through, find the content you need quicker, and keep the deal progressing.

Doug Cullen (20:45)

Yeah, no. I was going to say that the next thing that we just covered, because I think this is a super important part, and maybe just bring up the screen again if you don't mind, is this notion of preparing for potential Q&A. One of the most critical things within a deal is really trying to think about, if I'm selling an asset, what are the likely questions that I'm going to get? If I'm an advisor, I'm trying to anticipate that. If I'm an underlying corporate, I'm trying to deal with that. I'm working with advisors on doing a deal in order to understand that, not only to make sure that we're prepared for any prospective questions.

Do I have the right documents? Do I have the right command of the overall content? Some of these projects involve massive amounts of content. If you showcase that again, can you walk a little bit through anticipating potential questions and how you're leveraging Copilot in this instance to maybe give you some preliminary responses to that?

Caitlin Murdy (21:51)

Yeah. What we're seeing here is that it's going through my data room. Again, it's reading through the content to understand what's there and then start to think about what buyers might ask, what gaps we might have, or what gotcha moments might come up.

If there's something that maybe you didn't realize you were sharing or how you were sharing it, it even flags where it thinks you're going to get a lot of questions. I was talking to a group yesterday of bankers who mentioned that a lot of times what they're doing now is they want to make sure their data room is set up and ready to go in alignment with the story they're trying to tell from the CIM. To be able to use a tool like Copilot to say, this is the story we're selling, by uploading the CIM and what they've crafted there, does the data room align to that?

That's exactly what this is doing here. It's helping you get a sense of the story you're telling with your data room by the questions people might ask.

Doug Cullen (22:50)

Yeah. It is a crucial component of how deals get done. On the advisory side, you're doing a lot of this hard work upfront, right, to try to anticipate, be prepared, and optimize the time of the people who are involved in the deal. Across the deal team, of course, you've got the deal team extension, which we like to think of as your Datasite team, Project Pros, and of course our platform and our experience.

But this is really showcasing some new capabilities that platforms like Copilot, really leveraging the capabilities that Blueflame AI brings to the table, are taking up a notch.

Caitlin Murdy (23:34)

One hundred percent. And I think to that point, another use case that we want to show is file renaming. We flagged it as we went through our readiness checklist. You might identify that you have inconsistent naming standards, or you might be working where you're receiving all this content, like you said, scanned documents where the title is Scan #4 XYZ. It's really tough for teams to understand what that is.

In working with admins of data rooms, I often get asked, how can we use AI to rename files? This is one of my favorite use cases to show. Again, this is an example of where it's leveraging both the Blueflame AI Assistant and MCP. Sure, with just MCP, you could push out new file names. But by having Blueflame AI enable the content to provide the LLM with the understanding of what's in the document, the titles that it provides are going to be a lot more accurate and realistic to what the content is.

So if you're ever a buyer in the data room, you know what you're looking at when you open a file. In this case, I'm saying, review the standard file naming convention and then, in this folder, update the file names to make sure they incorporate that. What I love about it is that, obviously, naming the files in a data room is a pretty risky task. You don't want it to go wrong. Copilot is going to double-confirm with me. It's going to first lay out what naming convention it sees across the data room, where it sees the gaps, and then put together what its plan is to proceed.

Once I go in and confirm that, then it executes, and now my file names are all consistent throughout.

Doug Cullen (25:27)

I mean, it's kind of magic. If you think about how this needed to be done even in our world-class platform in Diligence, there are a couple of different ways that we had this. Before this, you could do it in an Excel spreadsheet, you could load that, or you could tap into our Project Pros. They spend plenty of time renaming files on behalf of customers. I mean, literally hundreds of hours of work we're happy to do on your behalf.

But again, these are human-centered processes. Now we can have that consistency at the content layer, at the folder level, and at the file-name level. Again, that tidiness goes a long way around the quality of the asset and ultimately the quality of the diligence. What we're looking for is effective and efficient diligence when you're selling an asset.

Caitlin Murdy (26:15)

And efficient is such a key word there. It's efficient in how the admins are doing it because now they can rename the files, or whatever the task is, way quicker than before.

But it also adds efficiency to the buy side because they can find what they need quicker.

Doug Cullen (26:33)

Yeah. And just to clarify as well, because these have come up a couple of different ways, these are capabilities right now that are enabled on the project via the Blueflame AI Assistant, and what we're showcasing right now are tools and capabilities that are available to admins only. These are people who have full rights to rename, move content, etc. Our plan is to extend some of these capabilities to reviewers, or the classic sell-side capabilities. Administrators are sell side; reviewers would be buy side. That's something that we are currently working on.

You can stay tuned for some of those capabilities. We have a few minutes, so maybe we'll go into some of the Q&A. Okay. This question is, does this mean that sellers' preparations can largely take place in the data room rather than beforehand in their own file storage system?

Caitlin Murdy (27:40)

Yeah. They can definitely do things in the data room, or if the content is moving over to the data room, they can manage it there. They can upload directly via Copilot.

It'll bring them a link to their data room to upload there, so they have some flexibility in how they work with these things.

Doug Cullen (28:00)

Yeah. And just to add some color to this, it is not uncommon for people working with that preliminary set of content to have it on a local shared drive, a local hard drive, or a set of material that they're working with in order to stage it prior to loading it onto Datasite. Our recommendation would be to get it up there immediately, take advantage of these tools, and take advantage of the Blueflame-enabled content.

I know if I have an environment just on my laptop, my capabilities on Datasite are vastly superior to what I'm able to do just in a standard operating system.

Caitlin Murdy (28:42)

Definitely. That's what we've seen as we first went to market with the Blueflame AI Assistant. It helps understand, especially for admins, the content that's going into the data room. So if you're a sell-side advisor and you're not as familiar with the company but you need to start to move all of the content around, you can easily understand that based on the Blueflame AI Assistant.

Doug Cullen (29:05)

Yeah, and just a quick question here as well. If files are renamed, will links shared previously to docs still work? The answer, I believe, is yes. The document itself doesn't really change your authorization or permission to that document; it's just going to be refreshed from a naming perspective in the UI itself. Does the file naming system limit the characters to avoid downloading errors? I think there is a character limit in the system. I'm not sure what it is these days.

Caitlin Murdy (29:38)

We have built in the ability, when you download, to concatenate the file names if needed to avoid errors. So we do account for that.

Doug Cullen (29:47)

Okay. We've got one more question. Thank you so much for the participation. I think we talked a little bit about it, but it's probably worth reinforcing here. Which advantages do you feel Copilot can bring to Datasite for workstreams in corporations during DD who are not involved in data structure setup as investment bankers? You want to take a shot?

Caitlin Murdy (30:14)

Yes, because I think it's actually the perfect question. We were running out of time, so we didn't show our last prompt.

One great example of this is responding to buyer questions. If you are on a corporate workstream, you're managing as part of the sell side and you're getting a lot of questions from buyers that you need to respond to based on the content in the data room, you can easily upload that tracker into Copilot or your preferred tool, and it's going to read through the content within the data room and be able to pull out responses. What I love about it is that I've prompted it as well to give a confidence score and to link back to the data room.

So it's really directing me to take a first pass to get a draft of my answer, but then to validate within the data room.

Doug Cullen (31:05)

Yeah. And I think it's going to really transform the way deals get done. I've been doing this for a couple of decades at this point, but I think having the ability for people with all sets of experiences to log into the data room and ask some basic questions, and prepare via natural language, opens this up for corporate users, people who may or may not be as familiar with it, as well as a bunch of senior people who typically may not log into it.

We heard a story from a senior banker who laughed and said, I may log into a data room for the first time in like a decade, because that's been effectively almost pushed down to some of the junior levels. While it is really paramount for advisors to be in tune with all the different shifting dynamics of the content within the deal, what questions people may ask, and how you ask them, we're going to have to leave that here. I want to thank you, Caitlin, for such an amazing job here today. Always a pleasure working with you.

Caitlin Murdy (32:06)

You too.

Doug Cullen (32:08)

Yeah. It's a good time here, and we're going to have to wrap things up. Look, this is happening. We're at the forefront of capabilities with MCP and showcasing what Copilot will be able to do for our users around the world. We're thinking about this through the lens of governance, compliance, and ensuring that the confidential information you have does not leave and is not disclosed unintentionally outside of the secure barrier of Datasite that you've come to trust and love so much.

With that, please refer this to other people. We do have our next session in the series, where we're going through a little bit more in detail with Blueflame. I want to thank people from around the world for tuning in. I want to thank you, Caitlin, for doing such a magnificent job of showcasing these capabilities. The webinars are recorded. Please forward them around. Just an extended thank you to everyone who spent time with us here today, and I hope to see you on the next webinar next week.