Before Amplify even opened, the conversations were happening. Clients arriving with the same urgency, asking the same harder question — not whether AI would reshape investment banking, but how far ahead the early movers already were. What they saw across three days sharpened that instinct. Three themes defined what we heard, and together they define the opportunity that is on the table for investment banks.
1. Celeste: The AI platform built for investment banks
The marquee announcement at Amplify was the launch of Intapp Celeste, an AI-native agentic platform designed from the ground up for financial and professional services. This is not a productivity layer applied to generic software. Celeste is a purpose-built system of work, built around the workflows that determine whether investment banks win or lose: Relationship intelligence, deal sourcing, conflicts clearance, and execution.
The distinction matters. Most AI tools available to investment bankers today are designed for individual productivity. They answer questions, draft emails, and summarize documents. Celeste operates at the level of the firm. It executes complex, multi-step workflows autonomously, drawing on the organization’s proprietary data, institutional knowledge, and methodologies.
When every firm has access to the same AI models, the firms that win will be the ones that put their own knowledge, relationships, and deal history inside those models.
John Hall, CEO, Intapp
The example at Amplify demonstrated how Celeste works through playbooks, codified representations of a firm’s methodology. We showed how a financial sponsor deal screening playbook can process every incoming CIM immediately, cross-references each opportunity against a firm’s fund mandate, historical investment thesis, and the reasoning behind prior pass or pursue decisions stored in, inter alia, IC memos, and then delivers a structured recommendation table before an analyst or associate arrives in the morning. That’s pattern recognition of everyone up to and including the most senior partners, applied consistently to every opportunity, at a scale and at a speed that no team could match. While that example applies to private equity, there is no shortage of similar playbooks in investment banking that Celeste can and will execute with similarly favorable results.
For investment bankers, Celeste’s Context Engine is the critical differentiator. It maps a firm’s unique terminology, deal history, client relationships, and business logic into a semantic layer that AI agents can understand and act on. For example, it knows that a ‘qualified opportunity’ at one firm carries a specific meaning defined by that firm’s own transaction readiness, deal size,and sector focus.
The result is AI that thinks like the firm: One that can screen many more deals with the collective judgment of seasoned professionals embedded in every output, surface the warmest relationship path to clients and/or counterparties, and identify de novo or cross-sell opportunities hidden across thousands of client interactions that few if any professionals would otherwise ever have time to review.
2. Walls for AI: Why governance is the gateway to AI at scale
Investment banks operate in one of the most heavily regulated environments in the global economy. MNPI controls, information barriers, independence rules — these are not administrative constraints. They are the foundation of client trust, regulatory standing, and institutional reputation. Maintaining them, efficiently and accurately, separates firms that endure from those that don’t.
This reality has made many firms cautious about AI deployment. The promise of efficiency means nothing if the technology cannot respect the obligations that define how you operate. Deploying AI agents that can access, synthesize, and act on firm data without robust compliance controls is a liability, not a productivity gain. The compliance bar for your AI agents is no less rigorous than the compliance bar for your people. Walls for AI ensures they clear it.
Intapp’s Walls for AI is an industry standard for professional compliance governance that embeds ethical walls, insider lists, MNPI controls, and information barriers into the architecture of every AI agent and platform that touches your firm’s data. The principle is straightforward: The same access controls that govern your people govern your AI. If a professional cannot – because he or she should not – see information about client or deal, Celeste can’t see it either. Governance is not a configuration setting; it travels with every playbook, across every integrated tool, automatically.This matters for two reasons that leaders at investment banks should understand:
- Scale without scaled risk: Agentic AI allows firms to process vastly more data, relationships, and engagements simultaneously. Walls for AI ensures that increased throughput does not mean increased exposure. Your compliance posture is maintained regardless of how many agents are running or how many workflows those agents are executing in parallel.
- Deployment confidence: Firms that have hesitated to deploy AI broadly, concerned about data leakage, wall breaches, or regulatory exposure now have an architecture that addresses those concerns at the foundation level.
The investment banks that lead the AI transition will not be the ones that simply moved fastest. They will be the ones that moved with the right infrastructure, and governance is the infrastructure that makes everything else possible.
3. What Anthropic at Amplify actually told you about your AI gap
Anthropic builds some of the most powerful AI models available today. Claude is a large language model with strong reasoning capabilities, deployed across industries and use cases at scale. Anthropic is a force in the AI landscape, and their presence as collaborator at Amplify reflects a relationship that has real strategic depth.
Anthropic specializes in a general AI platform trained on public data. Intapp specializes in your firm, and your industry. It knows your deal history, your client relationships, your sector and product strengths, your business selection reasoning, and the compliance logic that governs every action your professionals take. The Anthropic-Intapp collaboration combines both: Claude’s reasoning capability deployed inside Intapp’s layer of firm-specific knowledge, compliance enforcement, and deal workflow integration.
Anthropic provides the intelligence. Intapp provides the context, the compliance, and the institutional knowledge that makes that intelligence actionable for your firm.
Thad Jampol, Chief Product Officer, Intapp
Intapp takes Anthropic’s model and makes it investment-banking-ready. That means grounding every output in your firm’s proprietary data through the Context Engine, enforcing compliance obligations at the architecture level through Walls for AI, and structuring the model’s reasoning through Playbooks built on your firm’s own deal methodology embedded directly into DealCloud.
For investment banking and technology leaders evaluating AI strategy, this is the right framing. Every firm will have access to the same models. The question is which platform deploys those models within a specific bank’s specific context, with that firm’s compliance obligations enforced, and in the workflows that determine competitive position.
The strategic imperative
Investment banking has always been a business where information advantage, relationship depth, and execution speed determine outcomes. Agentic AI does not change those fundamentals; it amplifies them at a scale that was previously unimaginable.
The firms that move now to embed Celeste into their deal workflows, deploy Walls for AI as the governance foundation, and leverage the DealCloud – Anthropic collaboration through Intapp’s investment banking solution will operate at a fundamentally different level than those still running AI as a series of disconnected pilot programs. The question one of our keynote speakers left the room with is the right one for every investment banking leader in this moment: “Are you protecting your past, or are you building for your future?”
If you couldn’t join us at Amplify but want to understand what these announcements mean for your firm, we’ve got you covered. Join us for our upcoming webinar on April 16th, where we’ll break down the key updates, explore what they mean for investment banks, and show the strategic advantage agentic AI will offer investment banking teams.
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Reserve your spot and see what firm AI could look like for your organization.