By Alex Bajdechi, VP of Sales, Deal Engine
Everyone is trying to get AI into their business.
Across private equity, there is growing pressure to adopt AI. Firms are continuing to experiment with LLM’s, automation tools, and agents, often with the expectation that these technologies will unlock efficiency, insight, and competitive advantage. The focus, however, is frequently on deploying the latest capability rather than addressing the conditions required for it to work effectively.
In many cases, AI is being layered onto environments where data remains fragmented across CRMs, sourcing platforms, market data tools, document libraries, internal models, and bespoke systems. Without integration, consistency, and reliable data flows, AI does not clarify decision-making. It amplifies uncertainty. Models trained on incomplete, conflicting, or poorly governed data struggle to produce outputs that deal teams trust or act on.
This creates a paradox. AI is intended to reduce inefficiency, yet when introduced without first consolidating systems and data, it can compound the very problems it is meant to solve. Time is still lost moving between tools, reconciling information, and validating outputs. Adoption suffers, confidence erodes, and opportunities are missed. The result is not transformation, but fatigue, at a point when firms are under more pressure than ever to move quickly and decisively.
Over the last decade, private equity firms have made significant investments in technology and data. CRMs, deal sourcing platforms, market intelligence tools, portfolio analytics, expert networks, and bespoke internal systems have all become part of the modern deal team’s toolkit.
Individually, many of these tools are valuable. Collectively, they have created a new problem: UI fatigue.
Today’s dealmakers spend an increasing amount of time toggling between platforms. Logging in and out, cross-referencing screens, reconciling conflicting data points, and trying to remember where a particular insight came from. What was meant to increase efficiency has, in many cases, had the opposite effect.
Every additional platform adds cognitive overhead. Instead of spending time building relationships, travelling to meet business owners, or deepening ties with intermediaries and investment banks, deal professionals are stuck stitching together fragmented views of the same opportunity.
The issue is not a lack of intelligence. Firms are better informed than ever. The issue is that intelligence is scattered across too many interfaces, each with its own assumptions, data models, and definitions of truth.
As more products and data sources are layered in, it becomes harder, not easier, to answer basic questions. Which data do we trust? What has already been reviewed internally? Where should attention be focused right now?
UI fatigue also creates misalignment inside the firm. Different teams rely on different tools. Different partners trust different datasets. Notes live in one system, scores in another, and decisions somewhere else entirely.
When that happens, confidence erodes. Deal teams second-guess the data, hesitate to act, or duplicate work that has already been done. The cost is not just time. It is momentum.
At this stage of the market’s maturity, the answer is not adding yet another point solution. It is consolidation.
Firms need a single environment where intelligence is unified, validated, and presented through operating models specific to how their firm makes decisions. That means fewer screens, fewer signals, and far less noise.
The goal should be intentional reduction. By design, a dealmaker should have less to look at, not more.
Less toggling. Less deciphering. Less ambiguity.
This is where Deal Engine fits. Deal Engine is the conncective tissue, bringing together your internal data and external structured and unstructured data to create a clean single source of truth that powers your LLMs of choice. The technology applies firm-specific data validation rules and workflows so that only relevant, trusted information rises to the surface - saving the dealmaker days of research and sourcing time.
Instead of forcing deal teams to reconcile conflicting signals across tools, the platform does that work upstream.
The result is clarity. Dealmakers see what matters, understand why it matters, and can move forward with confidence, without drowning in interfaces.
After a decade of tech proliferation, private equity does not need more dashboards. It needs fewer, better ones.
Deal Engine helps firms get there, so deal teams can spend less time managing software and more time doing what they do best: finding, building, and closing great investments.