Read the full article on FinTecBuzz: FinTech Interview with Phil Westcott, Founder and CEO of Deal Engine
There's no shortage of PE firms experimenting with Frontier AI like Claude. But talk to most Managing Partners about what's actually working, and you'll hear the same frustration: fragmented efforts, high token consumption, and AI that produces confident output from incomplete information.
Claude represents a big opportunity for PE. But to gain competitive edge, focus on what your firm uniquely knows and create the knowledge foundation so you learn from every token you use.
That's the core argument Phil Westcott, CEO of Deal Engine, made in a recent interview with FinTecBuzz, and it's one worth unpacking for any firm that's aiming to build durable competitive advantage with Frontier AI.
The 90% problem nobody talks about
Phil spent four years on the IBM Watson team during the first wave of enterprise AI. One thing that became clear early: the technology was rarely the hard part. Data engineering was. In his words, it represented 90% of the challenge of operationalizing AI. That observation hasn't aged. It's become more relevant.
Deal Engine is built on exactly the principles he discusses in this interview. We help PE firms integrate their proprietary knowledge and external market data into a single, curated platform, so that the AI working for your team is working from the full picture, not a fragment of it.
If you want to understand what that looks like in practice, our guide is a good place to start. It covers the architecture, the use cases, and what it takes to move from piloting to scaling.
Download the guide: Why every PE firm needs a proprietary market data engine.
