A 90-Day AI Adoption Plan for a Boutique Investment Bank

Before day one: decide what you are measuring

Most AI rollouts at small banks can fail before they start because nobody wrote down what success looks like. Pick two numbers on the day you sign up, not on day 90. The first is associate hours per mandate on production work: the CIM draft, the buyer list, the NDA log, the weekly owner update. Have the associate on your next mandate keep a plain timesheet for one week before the tool arrives. It does not need to be precise. It needs to exist so there is a baseline.

The second number is calendar days from engagement letter to first teaser out the door. Pull it from your last three closed mandates. Partners usually guess this number is shorter than it was.

That measurement discipline is consistent with NIST's voluntary AI Risk Management Framework, which treats governance, measurement, and ongoing risk management as core activities [1]. For firms that provide investment advice, the SEC Investor Advisory Committee has also emphasized consistent testing, monitoring, governance, and oversight around AI use [2].

Also decide who signs off on what leaves the firm. On day one, that answer is the same as it was last year: the managing director on the mandate reads everything client-facing. AI does not change the reviewer. It changes how much the reviewer waits for a draft.

Write both numbers and the reviewer rule on one page. That page is the whole project charter. Anything longer will not be read.

Days 1 to 30: one mandate, one owner, one phase at a time

Choose a mandate that is live and early. Ideally the engagement letter was signed within the last two weeks and the questionnaire has not gone to the owner yet. Do not pick the mandate everyone is stressed about, and do not pick one that has been sitting in the drawer for eight months. A live but calm mandate is the right test bed.

Assign one associate as the operator. That associate owns the login, the setup, and the daily use. The analyst on the deal supports but does not own. The managing director reviews output and does not touch the tool unless they want to.

Work through the first three phases in order. Week one is discovery and readiness: send the client questionnaire through the platform instead of email, let the owner upload to the portal, and see what the readiness view flags. Week two is valuation: run it, then run it again with the same inputs to confirm you get the same figure, then trace two line items back to source. Weeks three and four are marketing materials: generate the teaser and CIM drafts, mark them up by hand, and record how long the markup took versus how long a blank-page draft would have taken.

At the end of day 30, the associate writes a one-page memo: what worked, what needed the most editing, and what the owner said about the portal. The managing director reads it. That is the first gate.

Days 31 to 60: second mandate and the written procedure

The second month has two jobs. The first is onboarding a second mandate with a different associate as operator. The first associate trains the second. If the training takes more than half a day, the tool is harder than it should be, or the first associate learned things that need to be written down.

That is the second job: the standard operating procedure. Keep it short. For each of the six phases, write what goes into the platform, what comes out, who edits it, and who signs it. Most firms may end up with two or three pages. The CIM section is often the longest because it names what the banker must rewrite every time: the investment thesis, the growth narrative, and anything with the owner's voice in it.

In this month, also start buyer matching and outreach on the first mandate. Build the prospect list from the platform's buyer-matching workflow, then have the senior banker on the deal review it against their own relationships. Record which names the banker added and which they struck. That record becomes the start of the firm's buyer-knowledge layer, and it is worth more than any feature.

By day 60, two mandates are running in the pipeline, the SOP exists, and two associates can operate independently. If any of those three is not true, extend this block rather than moving on.

Days 61 to 90: the full pipeline and partner adoption

The third month is about the back half of the process and about getting partners to look at the screen. On the first mandate, NDAs should be going out and coming back, data room access should be granted inside the pipeline, and IOIs should start arriving. Set up the IOI comparison view before the first offer lands so the partner sees it populated rather than empty.

The partner conversation changes here. Up to now, partners received output from the associate. Now ask them to open the pipeline themselves once a week, ideally before the Monday deal meeting. Some partners may resist at first, then stop asking the associate for status if the screen gives them what they need.

Move every remaining live mandate onto the platform in this block, even late-stage ones. A mandate at LOI still benefits from the pipeline for diligence tracking and the owner portal for document requests. The point is that by day 90 there is no mandate running the old way, because two parallel workflows can be worse than either one alone.

On day 90, compare the two numbers you wrote down before day one. Associate hours on production for the first mandate versus the baseline. Days from engagement letter to first teaser on the second mandate versus the three-deal history. Those two comparisons, plus the associate memos, are the whole report to the partnership.

What to do if a block slips

Blocks slip. The usual causes are an owner who is slow on the questionnaire, a partner who sends the CIM back to a blank Word document, or an associate who gets pulled onto a pitch. None of these necessarily mean the plan is wrong.

If the owner is slow, that is information about the owner, and the portal shows you which requests are open, which is more than email ever told you. If the partner rewrites from scratch, ask them to mark up the draft instead, once, and compare. If the associate is pulled, the second associate takes over, which is why the plan trains two by day 60.

The one slip that matters is skipping the baseline. Without the two numbers from before day one, day 90 is a set of opinions. With them, it is a decision.

How Acquivo Pro fits

Acquivo Pro is built for this sequence. On one login, the associate runs the valuation, generates the teaser and CIM from the questionnaire and data room, builds a prospect list using the platform's buyer-matching workflow, and manages NDA, IOI, and LOI flow for every client in one pipeline. The owner sees a branded portal where requests appear and uploads happen once. Per-seat pricing with no per-deal fees means the bank can add mandates without a new fee for each deal, subject to its seats. To see it on a live mandate, request a demo through the Contact page.