How Buyers Are Already Using AI, and What It Means for Sell-Side Banks

What the buy side is testing and automating

The pattern on the buy side is emerging across sponsors of different sizes, even though the maturity of each workflow varies. A fund's business development team receives more opportunities than a deal team can investigate in depth. Triage, which used to mean an analyst reading each blind profile and tagging it against the fund's thesis, can now be assisted by tools that classify a teaser by sector, size, and fit and surface the ones worth a closer look. Bain describes generative AI use in sourcing, screening, and diligence, including tools that help teams work through large pools of information. [1]

Once an NDA is signed and the CIM arrives, the next step is to get the financials into the fund's model. Associates have long rekeyed figures from PDFs and reconciled narrative claims with tables. Document extraction and summarization tools can reduce that initial manual work, flag apparent inconsistencies, and produce a first list of diligence questions. Strategic acquirers with corporate development teams can follow a similar path with internal tools built on comparable models. Those outputs still require review against the source documents.

None of this replaces the buyer's investment committee or the partner's read on management. It can compress the time between receiving materials and forming a view, while raising the standard for checking the materials. Adoption is not universal. McKinsey reported in 2024 that many PE operating partners saw portfolio-company experimentation, but only a small minority reported production use at scale. [2]

The first reader may be a parser

The first consequence for the sell side is mechanical. A teaser or CIM now has to work for a parser before it works for a person when the buyer uses document-analysis software. Financial tables that are images rather than text, inconsistent period labels, EBITDA presented three different ways in three sections, or a revenue figure in the narrative that does not match the table were always sloppy. A human reader could reconcile them. Software may flag them, and the flag can shape a buyer's first impression of the bank.

This is an argument for materials generated from a single structured source. When the CIM's figures come from the same normalized data as the valuation, the tables can agree with the narrative because they were produced from the same inputs. When the teaser and the CIM are drafted from one questionnaire, the sector description, customer count, and growth rate can match across documents. A buyer's extraction tool then has fewer inconsistencies to surface, and the deal team starts from a cleaner read.

The practical standard is this: every number in the marketing materials should trace to one source, and the same number should appear the same way everywhere it appears. That used to be a quality goal. It is now a sensible minimum for materials that may be read by a machine first.

The response can come faster and sharper

The second consequence is pace. A buyer that can extract and model a CIM more quickly may return with questions sooner, and the questions may be more specific. Instead of asking, "Can you walk us through the customer base?" the bank may hear, "Customer concentration in the top five moved from 38 percent to 46 percent between the two periods in the appendix. What happened?" The tool surfaced the comparison, but the associate still decides whether it matters and asks the question.

A sell-side team that takes a week to answer because the underlying data is spread across the owner's files, the analyst's workbook, and a data room that has not been updated can lose momentum and credibility. The team that can answer the same day, because the data is normalized and the source of every figure is known, is better positioned to keep both. That is a process advantage, not a guaranteed outcome.

The same logic applies to the IOI phase. Buyers that have modeled the business early may submit earlier or with more conviction. A bank that has not prepared its IOI comparison framework before the deadline can find itself summarizing letters by hand while buyers wait for feedback.

Diligence questions can arrive pre-written

The third consequence shows up after the LOI. Buyers can use the CIM and data room index to prepare a diligence request list before the first diligence call. The list may be long and organized by workstream, and it may arrive early in exclusivity. A sell-side team that has not anticipated it can spend the first two weeks of diligence collecting documents that could have been staged before launch. The point is not that every buyer uses the same tool or arrives with the same list. It is that document analysis makes early, structured question generation more practical.

The defensive move is to run readiness early. If the bank's discovery phase identifies what a buyer is likely to ask for in each vertical and stages it in the data room before marketing begins, the diligence list meets a room that is more complete. The owner is asked for what is missing, once, through a portal, rather than repeatedly through the bank. That can reduce avoidable rework, although the bank still owns the judgment about what to disclose and when.

This is where the sell-side bank's own tooling matters most. A platform that organizes the data room by the structure buyers expect and tracks which requests are open against which workstream can help a small team handle a long request list without assigning one person to maintain a separate tracker.

What this means for the boutique's pitch

A managing director can turn this into an advantage at the pitch. Owners do not always know that buyers may read materials with software. Explaining that possibility, and explaining how the bank checks its materials against that first read, is a credible differentiator. The bank that can say, "Every number in your CIM traces to a source, and the data room is staged for the diligence list before we launch," is making a process claim it can demonstrate rather than a promise about a buyer's reaction.

It also reframes the conversation about speed. The owner hears that some buyers are becoming faster at reviewing information, and that the bank is set up to match that pace rather than be caught by it. The pitch becomes less about relationships, which every competitor also claims, and more about a process built for a market in which human judgment is supported by software.

What a bank should change this quarter

Three changes follow directly. First, move marketing materials to a single source of truth so the teaser, the CIM, and the valuation agree by construction. Second, build the IOI comparison framework before launch, not after the deadline, so the bank can respond to early offers when they arrive. Third, stage the data room against a vertical-specific readiness checklist before marketing begins, so a buyer's early diligence questions meet a more complete room.

Each of these is a production task. None requires the managing director's judgment to set up, and each can make the judgment she applies later faster and better informed. A bank that does these three things is better matched to how some buyers now work. A bank that does not is asking buyers to tolerate avoidable process friction.

A practical exercise for this week is to take one live teaser and CIM, extract every recurring number into a reconciliation sheet, and compare that sheet with the data room index. Give the associate who owns the mandate a named review checkpoint. Record each mismatch and fix the source rather than patching only the document in which it appeared.

How Acquivo Pro fits

Acquivo Pro produces sell-side materials from one structured source. On one login the bank runs deterministic valuations across 21 industry verticals in which every figure traces to its origin, generates teasers and CIMs from the same client questionnaire and data room so the documents agree, and manages NDA, IOI, and LOI flow in a single pipeline so early offers can be compared as they arrive. Buyer matching is organized in the platform's buyer database and the bank remains responsible for screening, outreach, and every decision. The owner uploads once through a branded portal. To see it on a live mandate, request a demo through the Contact page.