Can AI even provide ROI for finance?
I’ve been tracking how junior deal teams audit AI summaries. It seems like using Claude to draft an IC Memo section takes seconds, but verifying the numbers forces an Associate to waste 4 hours Ctrl+F'ing across a CIM and a QoE report anyway. I built a crude split-screen UI layout that auto-maps numbers directly to pixel bounding boxes to solve this. Am I over-engineering a non-existent problem, or is document fragmentation and text-trust a real Sunday-night bottleneck?
I did this in claude code for free. took 5 mins
Curious what that 5 min version looked like — did it cross-reference against the QoE report too, or just extract from the CIM? That reconciliation step across docs is the part I'm trying to solve
The problem with AI in PE specifically is that there is not a real tangible way to increase our throughput. at the end of the day, we only have X dollars of committed capital to allocate across 10 platforms per investment. All the AI enablement in the world is not going to change that and so you effectively run up against a deployment wall that AI cannot solve.
in banking, unlike PE, Ai absolutely can increase your throughput. You hypotehtically can create cims faster, get models done quicker, so you can reduce the prep time of a sell side down which in theory should let you grow your pipeline and actually convert that to revenue.
back to Pe though, i do think as AI gets better, you can get efficiencies in other ways. the auditability is getting way better so thats one source of efficiency, but its also getting better and cutting my data in novel ways. that doesn't increase my throughput but it does help me feel like im getting an 'edge' over my prior ability to synthesize datapacks. on the ftont end of new deal work, it is also allowing folks to create and explore more theses to invest behind (hopefully you know when to call out Claude's BS though)
so, long way of saying, hard to say it will create real ROI (measured i guess as increased returns or larger fee pools) but it will create efficiencies and i wouldn't want to be at a fund that doesn't appreciate that
Agreed. I think it is really helpful in portco work. Pushing along projects with management, cleaning up crappy financials, etc.
The throughput point is interesting. makes sense that deployment constraints are the real ceiling, not analysis speed. Curious on the auditability piece you mentioned though: when you're synthesizing across multiple data packs, is the bottleneck more about finding the disagreements between sources, or figuring out which source to trust once you've found one
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