How dealmaking AI is enhancing the power of advisors to guide transactions

Investment banks and law firms have always created value by helping to steer clients through complex deals. AI is helping them do that with greater speed, confidence, and insight by removing much of the manual work while providing greater clarity of data.

Every M&A advisor knows the feeling. A transaction hits the home stretch, and everything is at breakneck pace. Documents pour into the data room. Buyer questions multiply. Multiple stakeholders need updates. Tight deadlines leave little room for error, yet every answer, every approval, and every disclosure must be accurate and defensible.

Now AI is becoming a genuine execution advantage for advisors. It’s transforming an administrative burden that for decades has been considered merely part of the job. AI adoption among advisory firms is moving well beyond experimentation, according to the latest report from Datasite in collaboration with FT Longitude: The new deal team: What 1,000 dealmakers reveal about AI-driven M&A. Nearly three-quarters of professional services respondents believe that firms ignoring AI will struggle to compete over the next five years, while around two-thirds agree that using AI across the deal process is now an essential part of risk management.

But for advisors, the ability to work so much faster is simply a means to an end. What will really make a difference is being able to do more to help clients navigate the decisions that shape successful transactions. Every hour they can reclaim from searching documents, organizing information, and managing repetitive workflows, is time to do what they’re really good at.

How AI can give advisors free rein

Non-aficionados of horse racing often wonder, ‘How much difference does the jockey really make?’ It’s easy to assume that the horse does all the work, and yet, human champions emerge who consistently outperform the rest.

This kind of pattern is already emerging with dealmaking AI. With AI rapidly becoming available to every advisor, competitive advantage now comes from how effectively firms ‘ride’ it. More than half (57%) of professional services respondents say AI is already regularly used or fully embedded in due diligence, while both professional services and private equity/law respondents rank it among the areas delivering the greatest return on investment.

This uptake is only going to rise. When we hit the point that nearly every deal advisor is using AI, will that neutralize its advantages? No – because of how AI is being used.

Investment banks coordinate huge volumes of documents, while managing permissions, monitoring buyer activity, and keeping transactions moving. Law firms review contracts, identify legal issues, oversee disclosure, and help ensure that every step stands up to scrutiny. Success at all these depends on locating the right information quickly, but more crucially, recognizing its significance.

AI can summarize lengthy reports, retrieve relevant clauses, highlight inconsistencies, and reveal information that might otherwise remain buried in the small print. This means that advisors spend less time searching for answers, and more time assessing what those answers mean for the client.

This is where exclusively human skills can shine and prove the key to winning. With AI to move things faster, advisors can be smarter.

Q&A: from reactive bottleneck to strategic conduit

One of the most notorious pain points for advisors is the Q&A process. Few parts of a transaction generate so much invisible effort. Questions arrive from multiple buyers. Specialists across the business must be rallied to provide answers. Legal teams must scrutinize wording. Every answer must be checked for consistency, and traceable back to the supporting documentation.

This is one of the most likely times for a deal process to grind to a halt. But AI is helping to clear the congestion. More than half of all advisors already say that it’s now easier to handle questions at scale, with professional services especially in agreement at 61%. 

The real advantage lies in confidence rather than speed alone. When AI retrieves information directly from the data room, links responses to source documents, and supports review workflows, advisors gain a clearer audit trail alongside faster turnaround times. Every answer becomes easier to verify, approve, and defend.

Now, what used to be a bottleneck becomes a source of fresh momentum. With stronger assurances delivered at a faster pace, better and more confident decisions can be made on the back of the answers received.

How AI speed enhances human judgment

No client ever hired an advisor based on how fast they could read documents; they're hired based on how well they advise. All the AI speed in the world won’t give a poor advisor good judgment, but it will enable the good ones to give their absolute best.

Nor is this just a claim. It’s measurable. More than half of professional services respondents report improvements in deal execution speed, diligence efficiency, and earlier identification of risks. And yet, no one is in any doubt as to who remains responsible for the advice. Around three-quarters of respondents believe decisions to proceed to signing should remain firmly human-led, while none believe that AI should ever take over the decision entirely.

AI can organize evidence, identify patterns, and assemble information at remarkable speed. But the better it gets at this, the more emphasis will be placed on advisors’ judgment, recommendations, and ability to provide context. Meanwhile, the overall advantage comes from both combined.

Meeting the high bar for trust and security

One persistent fear over AI use in M&A is the risk to security and compliance. It’s here that advisor views begin to diverge. Although more than half (54%) of legal and PE respondents see this risk as holding back wider AI adoption, just 36% of professional services respondents say the same. This reminds us that law firms are inevitably more alert to the handling of sensitive information, while the other advisors may place greater emphasis on speed. In other words, their respective professional judgment is a decisive factor even in question of how much to rely on AI.

This is also why it’s so important to have AI that is built specifically for M&A. It must be able to operate inside secure deal workflows, respecting permissions, preserving audit trails, and providing transparent links back to source material. With these safeguards, even the most cautious firms will be able to embrace AI without shirking their responsibility for confidentiality.

Choosing the right AI for M&A advisors’ needs

AI for M&A has gone from ‘emerging capability’ to ‘everyday tool’ in the blink of an eye. There’s no reason to suppose this trend will slow or deviate. The question is: who will be able to reap the most advantage?

It’s unlikely to be those who simply automate the most tasks. As the great Bill Shoemaker showed, it’s not just about having the fastest horse. The M&A advisors who excel will be those who can weave AI into the entire advisory workflow, from diligence and Q&A through reporting and governance, to enable the most skilled professionals to oversee and own every important decision.

Supporting this evolution is at the heart of Datasite’s offering, which brings AI into the secure data room and the surrounding workflows. This sets advisors free to accelerate diligence, streamline Q&A, identify risks earlier, and maintain the lasting governance and control that clients expect.