As firms grow through lateral hiring, private capital investment, and M&A and geographic expansion, the volume of new business rises — and so does the compliance work required to accept it.
Every new engagement requires teams to clear intake, conflicts, and client obligations before it can be billed. The repetitive steps that stand between experts and their judgment limit how much a firm can accept.
In July, we announced the general availability of Intapp Celeste, our agentic AI platform for professional firms that’s grounded in your firm’s knowledge and policies. Now, Celeste is embedded directly inside Intapp Intake, Conflicts, and Terms. Your professionals can work with Celeste in the products they use every day, handing routine setup work to agentic playbooks and asking questions about their compliance data in plain language.
Preparation, not decision-making, is the real bottleneck
Compliance work depends on expert judgment. But before an analyst can weigh a conflict or clear a request, the search must be built, the details gathered and validated, the corporate structures mapped, and the context assembled.
Most of that preparation is repetitive, high-volume work that consumes hours and rarely calls for the analyst’s expertise. The burden doesn’t fall on compliance teams alone. The professionals who win the work must also conduct the same preparation work — completing intake forms manually, responding to follow-up questions, and waiting for clearance — before they can begin billing.
The effect compounds across the firm: Time-to-bill slows, new business stalls, and skilled professionals are pulled away from the higher-risk questions that need their attention.
Traditionally, firms have met growing compliance demands by adding headcount. But today’s growth is outpacing that model. Every lateral team, acquisition, and new office adds volume faster than a firm can recruit and train analysts to clear it.
Celeste offers a different approach by handling the preparatory tasks, allowing experts to remain in control of and provide judgment on every decision.
Celeste lifts the ceiling for compliance
Business acceptance workflows represent some of a firm’s most repetitive, high-volume compliance work. Celeste follows the same workflows your teams do, supporting every stage of the client lifecycle — from intake and conflicts clearance to ongoing client obligations.
- Business intake: The moment an email arrives, professionals can ask Intapp Celeste to open a new intake request — without leaving Outlook. Celeste extracts details from the email to auto-populate the form, then validates each answer in real time as the requestor reviews, edits, and completes the request. It also offers recommended enhancements before submission, so compliance teams can begin their assessment with complete, accurate requests — accelerating time-to-bill.
- Conflicts clearance: The moment a request arrives, Celeste builds the search strategy, matches corporate trees for each party, and runs the search automatically. It then triages the results for expert review, surfacing likely conflicts and helping to clear low-risk items faster. Celeste can also automatically draft the clearance summary, pulling together resolved hits and the details that matter, with a clear record of how each was resolved.
- Terms and client obligations management: When outside counsel guidelines arrive — through Outlook or the Intapp Celeste panel — Celeste reads them, matches them to the right client records, populates the key attributes, and categorizes the terms. It automatically ingests new guidelines from a shared inbox and categorizes them in Terms within seconds, eliminating manual cataloging.
Firms can also enforce configured terms — like block billing or restricted words — to auto-accept during AI categorization. The terms will flow straight into downstream applications like Time the moment Celeste ingests the new guidelines document — no handoff required.
- Compliance intelligence: An embedded Celeste panel sits directly in Intapp Intake, Conflicts, and Terms — giving professionals one place to ask questions about their compliance data in plain language and run routine playbooks. Answers are drawn from the firm’s own records, link back to the source for verification, and are grounded in the firm’s access policies. Risk and firm leaders get immediate answers during compliance procedures, strategic planning, and regulatory responses.
Celeste reflects how professional firms actually work
Unlike generic AI tools and point solutions — which require firms to adjust their workflows — Celeste is built for the professional services workflows your teams rely on today. It handles the repetitive tasks that precede every decision while allowing the expert to remain in control of the decision itself.
That balance is what governed AI looks like in a regulated firm. Celeste handles the preparatory work. Experts remain in control of every decision. And every step — the analysis and rationale behind each request, workflow, and decision — is documented. Firms accept more business faster, and every decision carries a clear account of how it was reached.
What’s next?
This is just the beginning. We’ll continue to introduce new ways for Celeste to support your teams and to put your compliance data to work across every workflow. The future is continuous compliance, where risks are identified, surfaced, and addressed before they become problems.
Learn more about how Intapp Compliance with Celeste works across the client lifecycle, or talk with your Intapp account team.