Walk into any law firm, private equity firm, investment bank, or accounting firm today and nearly every desk is using AI. Your professionals draft, build models, and review documents faster than they did a year ago. That was the right first move, and the gains are real.
But here’s the question we keep hearing from firm leaders: Our people are more productive, so why isn’t the firm growing faster?
The answer: Because AI built for the practice accelerates individuals. Meanwhile, the work that runs the firm itself — origination, screening, intake, conflicts, lateral hiring — still happens the way it always has: by hand, under deadline, by your most experienced people. And because their hours are finite, the firm rations that work — resulting in deals never screened, laterals never vetted, pitches never made.
This is what Firm AI changes — and it changes more than speed. A conflicts team that clears 20 matters a month can clear 200. A fund that screens 300 deals a year can screen 3,000, and can pursue entire categories of opportunity it used to filter out for practical reasons.
More than saved time, this is a new operating model for the firm. It’s why we built Intapp Celeste, now generally available.
Meet Celeste
Celeste is an expert AI coworker for the business of your firm. Give Celeste a goal, and it plans the steps, executes them across your firm’s systems, and brings finished work back for a professional’s judgment. It doesn’t wait to be asked — it just runs your pipeline brief every Monday morning, or starts a conflicts check the moment a new engagement lands.
Plenty of tools can answer a question about your work. Four things make Celeste a strategic coworker instead.
Celeste knows your firm
Every firm now has access to the same AI models, trained on the same public internet. What sets your firm apart is exactly what those models don’t know: your clients, your deals, your relationships, and the judgment behind every decision your firm has made. An AI without that context gives every firm the same answer.
Celeste is grounded in all of it. Natively integrated with your systems of record, Celeste inherits everything you’ve spent years configuring: your operating model, your terminology, your fields and data structures, your permissions. Celeste knows what “pipeline” and “coverage” mean at your private equity firm, and what “matter” and “key client” mean at your law firm, the way you define them.
- Context engine. A firm profile, connector onboarding, and domain model teach Celeste your data, your terms, and your relationships, so it reasons in your firm’s language.
- Native Intapp integration. Celeste connects across Intapp DealCloud, your compliance systems, and Intapp Time to draw on deal and matter history, relationships, and client activity.
- Memory. Celeste remembers your patterns, decisions, and preferences, and grounds its answers in the documents you choose.
Celeste gets the work done
An assistant answers your questions and waits for the next one — but those answers aren’t finished deliverables. And besides, the work that runs a firm doesn’t arrive in the form of questions; it arrives as jobs — CIMs to screen, matters to open, Monday meetings to prep for.
But Celeste delivers finished products: IC summaries drafted, records updated, briefs sent to your inbox — with your sign-off required at the points that carry risk. And because Celeste works before you ask, and at whatever volume the work demands, it takes on jobs no firm could staff before: screening every inbound deal against your mandate, or monitoring every lateral hire from sourcing through integration.
- Proactive agents. Celeste works in the background on schedules and events, then surfaces a curated agenda of finished work that’s ready for review.
- Document intelligence. Celeste produces Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files in your firm’s templates and branding, and edits existing documents with tracked changes.
- Read-and-write actions. Celeste automates follow-ups, task sequencing, and record updates across Intapp and connected systems, keeping your teams focused on client work.
Celeste works your firm’s way
Getting the work done is half the job. Doing it your way is the other half: the criteria you screen against, the order you run a conflicts check in, the way a pitch reads when it comes from your firm. Those methods are what separate you from the firm across the street — and until now they lived only in the heads of the people who use them.
Celeste encodes your methods as playbooks: multi-step agentic workflows that carry out your firm’s procedures from the first step to the finished output, so the work comes back the way your firm would have done it. Celeste ships with a library of playbooks curated by Intapp industry experts and shaped by our work with more than 1,000 firms — ready to run out of the box or tailor to how your firm operates.
- Playbook library. Access pre-built playbooks across deal origination, compliance, lateral hiring, business development, and more.
- No-code builder. Create your own playbooks, agents, and skills in plain language, then run them right from chat.
- Automations. Set playbooks to run on your schedule or start automatically when something changes in your systems, and get notifications in the app or by email.
Celeste enforces your guardrails
Professional firms operate under obligations most industries don’t: ethical walls, client confidentiality, independence requirements, MNPI. Any AI that touches your firm’s data must honor every one of them the way your people do — or else your general counsel will stop the rollout, and rightly so. Celeste has those guardrails architected into its core, and applies your ethical walls and access policies through a trust and control layer that governs Celeste by the same rules as your people — so restricted information stays that way, no matter what anyone asks.
- Guardrails. Permissions, ethical walls, and access controls run through one policy layer for trust and controls across human and AI identities, and Celeste acts only on what it’s permitted to use.
- Human-in-the-loop review. Sensitive tasks require review, approval, or refinement of Celeste’s actions before it executes.
Celeste connects across your ecosystem
Celeste also works where your work already lives. At launch, it connects natively to Intapp DealCloud, your compliance systems, Intapp Time, Microsoft 365, Snowflake, and the open web, with Model Context Protocol (MCP) partners including Moody’s, FactSet, PitchBook, and MSCI. It also meets your teams inside the AI tools they already use, working in Microsoft Copilot, Claude, and other tools through MCP, A2A, and API. No rip and replace.
Get started
We were able to build Celeste because of what we spent over 20 years building: the relationship data in DealCloud, the compliance backbone, and the working methods of more than 1,000 firms. Celeste is that foundation, put to work.
Everything described here is live: playbooks that run the firm’s work end to end, answers grounded in your own deals and matters, and governance built into the architecture. See Celeste in action, or talk to your Intapp account team.