Intapp recently hosted a webinar with investment banking professionals to explore how AI is reshaping the industry — from deal origination to compliance. If you missed it, here are the five most important takeaways.
1. Bankers want AI that predicts and connects the dots – not just answers questions
The conversation has moved well past chatbots. Investment bankers aren’t satisfied with AI that simply responds to prompts. They want systems that proactively anticipate their next move — telling them who to call, which deal resembles the one they’re working on, and who in the firm’s network knows the right board member.
Relationship capital is the foundation of investment banking, and bankers want AI that can dig into that network — surfacing connections that would otherwise require significant manual effort or get missed entirely. That’s why Celeste is built natively into DealCloud: so bankers can ask who in the firm knows a prospect’s board member, or which prior engagements resemble the deal they’re pitching, and get a substantive answer from their own firm’s data without leaving the platform they already work in every day.
2. The fear that AI will replace bankers is overblown – the real opportunity is amplification
Every investment bank our team speaks with is clear: replacing bankers is not the goal, and most don’t believe it’s possible. What they’re focused on is using AI to amplify the performance of their people — freeing them from manual, time-consuming tasks so they can spend more time on high-value work.
Think of it as AI acting as an augmented colleague. In practice, that looks like ingesting a meeting note and automatically populating the relevant client and engagement records in DealCloud, or uploading an LOI and having Celeste extract the structured deal data without a single field entered manually. The banker reviews and approves — the system handles the rest. The firms that will win are those that treat AI as a force multiplier on what already makes them strong: their people, their institutional knowledge, and their client relationships.
3. Shadow AI is a real risk – and it’s already happening
Demand from bankers for AI is intense — and that pressure creates a governance problem. When tools aren’t provided at the firm level, individuals go looking on their own. That means sensitive deal information potentially flowing into consumer-grade AI tools with no regulatory oversight, no standardization, and no shared best practices across the firm.
IT teams are right to be cautious. Confidentiality and regulatory compliance aren’t optional in this industry — they’re foundational. The answer isn’t to restrict AI access; it’s to give bankers a governed experience worth using. Because Celeste operates within the permissions, access controls, and information barriers already established in DealCloud, firms can meet that demand without creating new compliance exposure.
4. Generic AI tools can’t understand your firm – Firm AI can
Access to AI is now a commodity. The differentiation for your firm will never come from the model — it comes from your people, your relationships, and your institutional memory. The problem is that knowledge has always been fragmented: locked in email threads, documents, and people’s heads.
A generic large language model connected to your systems of record will struggle. It doesn’t understand your data model, your deal nomenclature, or your internal workflows. Celeste is different because it’s built on top of DealCloud — which means it already understands the investment banking data model: deal stages, counterparty relationships, engagement types, and your firm’s custom fields. The semantic layer that bridges AI and your proprietary data isn’t something your team has to build. It’s already there.
5. The biggest mistake firms make with AI? Waiting – and underestimating the human element
One upper middle market investment bank put it well during our conversation: “We don’t need to lead the marathon, but we certainly need to be in the race.” Firms that have waited on the sidelines are now telling us they wish they’d started sooner. Getting hands on the tools — even imperfectly — accelerates your AI strategy faster than planning from the outside.
The second mistake is treating AI as a set-it-and-forget-it solution. The banks seeing real results have someone internally driving adoption, sharing best practices, and helping bankers get value from the tools day to day. That human element can’t be underestimated. Because Celeste is embedded directly in DealCloud — the platform bankers are already in — it removes one of the biggest barriers to adoption: asking people to change how they work. The fastest path from “exploring AI” to AI that’s actually running your firm’s processes is making it feel like a natural extension of what your team already does.
Want to see DealCloud with Celeste in action?
During the webinar, our team demonstrated Celeste Chat inside DealCloud — including real-time meeting note ingestion, LOI data extraction, and live pipeline dashboards generated on demand. If you’d like to see a personalized demo for your firm.
