Explore the complete conversation below

Raj Bakhru (00:09.01)

AI is quickly becoming a critical part of how deal teams get real work done. The best dealmakers have found that AI can really enhance their deal process. They can make smarter decisions and they can get diligence and research work done faster. The fact that 62% have realized this is actually nascent. We're going to be at 100% very soon, because there's hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on the line.

Raj Bakhru (00:34.05)

And AI can really help you pressure test your thesis, really help you with your negotiation process, provide an objective sparring partner. There's a lot of value through the diligence process and double-checking your assumptions and helping you build complex models and validate those models, as well as building internal presentation content. AI is actually becoming a really great thought partner throughout the deal process.

Raj Bakhru (00:57.08)

The way dealmakers are leveraging AI now is with what we call prompt-first dealmaking. We found that there are a number of power users out there who have effectively leveraged AI for the past year or two. But what we're really focusing on is how we can elevate the entire team and the entire firm, and the way that they get their work done.

Raj Bakhru (01:15.02)

We've built out tools like Spaces that allow you to collaborate and work together, build firm-wide context and memory under deals, and that helps compound the information that's available to the AI across everyone working on that deal together. We believe that the tooling, the AI, can understand what good looks like for your firm and get you there faster.

Nevin Raj (01:35.16)

AI is changing how teams find the right opportunities earlier. Yeah, the ones who made it stick are the ones who are giving it a shot, right? There's nothing. It starts with experimenting, and it takes a lot of trial and error to figure out what works for you at different firms and trying this across the stack. But the commonality and the common thread we see with all of them is they're trying to get more opportunities earlier, and that's what's really working.

Nevin Raj (02:00.23)

It's being able to increase that top of the funnel, see more deals, and be the first to get invited to the data room. They'll be the first to get invited to the process and what that allows you to do. It's not just about speed, it's actually about information and access to information. Because if you can be under NDA with the CEO earlier, you have more time to build that relationship, to due diligence, to make sure that you can go into the deal knowing every single possible corner of what to expect.

Nevin Raj (02:28.12)

And that's what we're seeing work. So it's a little bit of just a willingness to take on some risk, a willingness to take on and try new use cases. That's allowing firms to really set themselves apart earlier. Visibility leads to better outcomes. And it's for two reasons. The first one I mentioned earlier is that you start to build the rapport earlier.

Nevin Raj (02:50.04)

There's nothing that gets a deal done better than trust. Every seller wants certainty to close. And if you can come in earlier, you build that relationship for a longer period of time. Every party knows how you're going to act in good times and bad, and that trust can be a differentiator even over terms like price at the end of the day.

Nevin Raj (03:10.02)

The second one about being earlier, besides information, besides trust, is you get more comfortable. It's the other side, right? You have more time to have access to information, to diligence deals. You know, when you're using platforms like Grata and BlueFlame, those help you accelerate and speed up your point of confidence and getting to a point where you can go in and drop an IOI or an LOI.

Nevin Raj (03:34.02)

So it's technology that helps you make that decision faster, but ultimately, you can't speed up how long it takes to build a relationship.

Merlin Piscitelli (03:46.09)

I think the new deal team really is enabled by AI. It's not replaced by AI. You're not going to see AI versus the humans. You're going to see the humans become better decision makers, increase efficiency, really shorten deal timeframes or shorten times to get to decisions. It's all about getting to a decision, yes or no. And AI is really going to enable deal teams to get to that decision a lot quicker than it is today.

Merlin Piscitelli (04:08.12)

So really more empowering the humans by AI versus AI versus the humans.

Nevin Raj (04:14.17)

Yeah, it's a fine balance because it's going to be very easy to miss things when AI is running analyses for you automatically. But the big thing here is being able to leverage AI in a way that gets you through the baseline, the easy work, the grunt work, so to speak, fast so you can get to that differentiating aspect.

Nevin Raj (04:36.19)

You know, what's interesting is you can ask AI a question, and it can give you two totally different answers depending on how you ask the question. So it's important to use AI to get the fact base and the data right. And then you have to make your own interpretation on top of that. The faster you can reach that source of truth and that sense of truth, then the more time you have to understand the risks and to understand how you feel about those facts based on the context of the deal.

Anjali Motiani (05:04.19)

AI is becoming a business transformation conversation. It is not just a technology conversation. At the end of the day, a good investment is one where we can have measurable business outcomes so that any investment does not become an experiment. If we have good, measurable business outcomes, we can track the ROI, we can track progress, we can track productivity, we can track efficiency.

Anjali Motiani (05:31.14)

I think when it comes to adoption, change management is an extremely important aspect. A lot of business transformations don't succeed, not because they had bad technology. It's because change was not managed well. We tend to lead with people, not just tools and data science. We want to create new habits, new ways of working, using AI. Getting employees excited about the tools we are putting in their hands.

Anjali Motiani (05:57.21)

Businesses need governance tools. Clear accountability and secure use cases. That is the reason why we want to keep change management as a strong program in the AI adoption, and not just a workstream within a project.

Raj Bakhru (06:16.00)

Trust of AI really requires two things. It requires that you have confidence that the information you're putting in the AI is not going to be revealed to others, that the AI is protecting your sensitive data. It also requires that you know that the data and the information that it is acting on, and what it outputs, is accurate, and without that accuracy, you're going to doubt everything that comes from the AI tool.

Anjali Motiani (06:39.17)

I think AI, like any other new technology, needs to earn our incremental trust, which cannot be and should not be fully assumed from the get-go.

Nevin Raj (06:49.14)

Besides security, it's like the one around accuracy that's so important, right? Ultimately, you need to make decisions about accurate information. And the key is knowing what sounds right versus what is right, because the LLMs are trained to really give you a convincing answer. If you have something that you can trust that you know is accurate every time you open it up, every time you read it.

Nevin Raj (07:11.02)

That allows you to go beyond the baseline analysis. What allows you to go to levels beyond the accuracy you get in your AI-based systems allows you to get to that judgment part, and the human part of decision-making and dealmaking that ultimately makes a difference in how fast and with what certainty you go into a deal.

Raj Bakhru (07:30.00)

The way that we've built our platform is that we've said we need to make accuracy validation super easy. We need to allow you to verify the source of any of the data that we're presenting back to you by clicking through direct citations and seeing the underlying data really quickly and easily. We also take security and privacy as critical matters.

Raj Bakhru (07:50.05)

We have zero data retention agreements with the LLMs. We minimize how much information we're sending to them. We protect that information because we know that so much rides on the fact that that information needs to stay secure.

Nevin Raj (08:04.09)

Yeah. The point around security, I think, comes back to trust. It's all about knowing that the information you use, the prompts you write, the way you interact with AI is not going to get out into the world and that your competitive advantage stays with you, which is why it's really important to go through a trusted provider that's SOC 2 compliant, that's ISO certified, that is going to take your best interests at hand.

Nevin Raj (08:25.21)

And isn't out there to go out and train their own model, which is why tools like Datasite and BlueFlame are being used because you trust that we provide you. Ultimately, we're here for the end customer to make their experience best. We're not here to go out and train our own LLMs and models, and use that input to make it better.

Nevin Raj (08:45.05)

So that allows us to be a trusted partner to our customers.

Merlin Piscitelli (08:48.01)

So trust matters in dealmaking because we're dealing with the most sensitive, confidential information. These are high-value, highly sensitive projects that people are running on our platform. So the trust level has to be there as you integrate new solutions or cutting-edge technology or implement AI. You want to do that in a safe environment with a trusted history of keeping that confidential information safe.

Merlin Piscitelli (09:12.11)

And so it's really important when you think about adopting new tools, that you are in a trusted environment to do that with the trusted organization who put security at the highest levels, and not just taking on a new bet with technology because it says it's going to give you a certain outcome. Really, you want to go with the most trusted partners to do that and explore these new tools in that trusted environment.

Merlin Piscitelli (09:34.21)

Future of dealmaking will be faster, but it has to be trusted.