How Will AI Change M&A and the M&A Labor Market?

As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies continue to emerge and advance, corporate and private equity dealmakers are eager to understand how the technology will transform M&A dealmaking.

Many recognize AI’s potential and want to know how to leverage it in their processes and workflows. Others are curious about how AI might reshape the job landscape within the M&A industry.

SS&C Intralinks’ Principal Product Manager, Ronjohn Dadd, recently sat down with Carolyn Vallejo from GrowthTV at DealMAX 2024 to discuss how AI is transforming M&A and the M&A job market, and how firms that want to stay ahead of the competition can get started with the right tools. 

During the discussion, Dadd affirms, “There are endless problems in the M&A deal execution process that you could look to solve that a lot of technologies out there are solving today.”

In their conversation, Ronjohn shares valuable insights gathered from our clients, including:

• How AI can drive efficiency and help teams save time during due diligence
• What we’re learning from early AI adopters in the M&A community
• How firms can determine the right M&A AI tool for their needs
• How we expect AI to impact jobs in the M&A labor market

Find out more about how AI is revolutionizing dealmaking here.

Transcript 

00:02 

Welcome back to Growth TV. I'm Carolyn Vallejo. Joining me here is Ronjohn Dadd, principal product manager at SS&CC Intralinks, to explore how AI is changing the dealmaking space, including job roles within M&A. Ronjohn, welcome to Growth TV.  

Thanks for having me.  

So first, I want to talk about some of the challenges in the dealmaking process that firms are hoping AI can really help solve.  

Yeah, I mean, they are endless. 

00:30 

Problems that happen in an M&A deal execution process that you could look to solve and a lot of technologies out there are solving today. You know, our organization, we are positioned to talk to a lot of clients that are in, you know, focus on the diligence part of dealmaking. And the diligence part of dealmaking is what ends up taking a lot of the time throughout these processes that take years, months, however long.  

01:00 

Over the past, you know, few years I've seen with COVID and a number of other just market issues going on, that deals are taking longer, they stall, and time kills all deals. So a lot of the M&A professionals that we've been talking to have really been focused on just driving efficiency in the core due diligence tasks and jobs that their bankers or their teams are working on on a regular basis. So simple things of spending less time. 

01:30 

Making changes to documents, preparing them to be viewed by potential buyers, and more time spent actually with our clients understanding them, and then moving forward in the deal process. I think their main focus is there's a lot that can be done with AI. I always say you can probably think of and do anything with AI, but right now it's like, how do I just get my job done faster with less resources? 

01:59 

Right, that makes sense. And as you just emphasized, there is so much potential in AI, but actually putting it into practice is kind of a different matter. Can you get me up to speed on what some of the early adopters of AI in the dealmaking community have done in terms of really using the technology to its full advantage right now?  

Yeah, I think everyone you talk to, they, pretty much everyone, they've put together an AI committee or something to start looking into it.  

02:26 

And where I've seen people be early adopters and start to make a difference early on is not just putting together these committees, go look at a bunch of different products, what else is out there, how are other people utilizing it, but actually doing an internal reflection of their own organizations and saying, all right, based on what we do, whatever our niche is, what we're providing to our clients, where are the different jobs and tasks that our teams are doing. 

02:55 

And even if they're easy ones that don't need fixing, getting all those onto paper and then identifying, okay, not only where there's a lot of time lost, but how frequently are those tasks that are losing time happening? Then not only how many times that it's happening, but how painful it is, how costly it is if a mistake is made.  

03:23 

And then I think the final point, which I think is really important for people to look at is if I were to fix this, how much of a competitive differentiation does that give my organization and firm? Because even if you do fix it and it helps cut down on time or processes, if it's not helping deliver to your ROI, get more customers, make customers happier or position my team as a knowledge expert.  

03:53 

You know, you're just solving some of the bare minimum pieces. So it's actually not like the people that go out and can find every single AI tool out there and figure out all the things that they can do. But more so let's internally reflect where the biggest areas that are going to produce the most return if we fix them. And then you can go and start that process outside looking at what else is out there.  

04:20 

So internal reflection, I think, is one of the most important pieces so that when you do have conversations and when I have conversations people they fully know, hey, this is the problem we're trying to solve, this is what we're looking to get out of it. And then you have a much more pointed focus as to the solutions and areas that you go look at. Okay, so deal makers want to solve problems, they want to make their jobs more efficient, but of course one of the biggest fears that we're hearing kind of in every industry is that AI is going to come after their job? 

04:47 

When it comes to dealmakers, what can we expect AI to have an impact on in terms of the labor market?  

Yeah, I think I'm a little bit more optimistic in this sense. Yes, I even said it before that you want to do more with less resources that doesn't always mean people though. And, you know, a lot of the things that people are looking to solve are not necessarily you know the individuals are constantly spending time on minuscule manual tasks, and we would rather not have people do that. But it's more so that typically in this industry, the people that you hire are very smart individuals. They went to great schools, are highly intelligent, and their skills and benefits are used or more useful in the more high-intelligent, high-profile tasks that have to be done. 

05:43 

Creating financial models, the actual analysis of companies, helping understand strategy, set direction for the companies that they're working with. So, in my view, maybe we will have to have less people working on a single pitch deck to remove comments all night. But that gives them the ability to really jumpstart their career earlier on, focus on high-value task, high-profile tasks, and become better advisors, better vendors, better lawyers earlier on with their clients, because they're spending more time with them rather than just sitting by themselves in a cube knocking things out of a spreadsheet and more time really doing what they've been hired for in their intellect, their strategy, their decision making. So, I think we'll see it change absolutely where the jobs that people come into are less process and grunt work that takes all night, but allows them to be much more focused on how they can help their clients and be strategic earlier on, not just waiting until you get to that senior partner or manager level. Right. So you're calling some fears here, which is great to hear.  

Thank you so much for joining Growth TV. AI is such a timely topic right now in the dealmaking community, so we really appreciate it.

Absolutely.