How AI is changing careers in M&A

People working in M&A work very, very long hours. Many of those hours – especially for junior professionals – are not spent doing anything particularly interesting. But that might change in the future, as there is a monster on the hill – AI.

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The impact of AI on M&A specifically might be one of the most discussed in the industry. But discussions are often vague. Paul Uren, JPMorgan’s head of investment banking in APAC, made some utterances on the benefits to Reuters earlier this year. “We are in the early phase adopting AI tools throughout our investment banking business globally but are excited by the developments,” Uren explained. “We're finding ⁠that AI streamlines the preparation of content and materials, as well as helping bankers engage with more clients more efficiently.”

“Content and materials” means pitchbooks and models. Pitchbooks are the big PowerPoint presentations that banks use to pitch to new companies. Models refers to the vast spreadsheets that banks use to value a business and what impact a merger would have on its accounts.

AI firms have noticed that there's an opportunity here. Anthropic has a head of financial services product, former Morgan Stanley banker Nicholas Lin. Anthropic has already announced ten “agent templates” for financial services professionals, including pitchbooks, monitoring earnings reviews, and building financial models.

OpenAI is not too far behind; it has more than 100 ex-investment bankers helping to train its models to build financial models. They were being paid around $150 an hour after careers at JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg reported last year.

AI, by building models and pitchbooks, can do what a banker does, but much quicker, and really much cheaper. Bain & Company, the consulting firm, noted that AI can analyse “procurement contracts, supply chain networks, R&D portfolios, and charts of accounts to confirm cost-synergy opportunities” two to three times faster than a human being can.

Sumeet Chabria, a former Bank of America executive who now runs consultancy ThoughtLinks, informed Business Insider last year that 30% of M&A processes could be automated by AI by 2030, and that this automation will include scanning public & private financial data and flagging operational, market, and geopolitical risks. Flesh-and-blood bankers will still review risks, provide context, and take the lead on “final” due diligence, though. Actual humans will also shape deal strategy and advise clients.

The consequence of further adoption will be job cuts. Debasish Patnaik, head of McKinsey’s AI consulting arm QuantumBlack, told Fortune in June that junior analyst classes would be cut by as much as two thirds due to AI.

Banks are unlikely to cut analyst/intern classes altogether, however. “Banking is an apprenticeship business. Today’s junior analysts become tomorrow’s managing directors,” Patnaik told Fortune. “Senior judgment cannot be manufactured laterally.”

Some banks are already trying to engineer a replacement for the apprenticeship. Lawrence Shaw, Deutsche Bank's head of workforce capability, thinks the answer is to push analysts and associates in front of clients earlier with more training. The training will involve fake deals using virtual, AI clients. 

Jobs in M&A will become harder to find in the meantime. Jobs are harder to come by. Banks are talking less about investing in people, and more about investing in AI – Citi CFO Gonzalo Luchetti, for example, said in the firm’s Q1 of 2026 analyst call that AI could “turbocharge” its investments, and that it intended to end the year with less headcount than it started it.

Lazard’s workforce might be the canary in the coalmine; the firm currently has a ratio of around 1:6 of dealmakers to junior bankers, and says it wants fewer juniors. It’s been suggested that that number might come down to 1:3, or perhaps even less.

Something unlikely to change in the industry is the number of hours worked, unfortunately. An M&A banker told us back in February that, even though many parts of investment banking would become automated, the 18-hour workdays will still stick around. Managing directors will still expect meetings to be scheduled and to happen. If they happen quicker, then all the best – book more meetings. “Hours will get slightly better, but not dramatically. I just don't see a world where analysts will uniformly finish at 8pm,” he said.

Much of the above is still theory. In practice, AI might even be able to advise on an entire deal from start to finish: the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that €200bn private equity firm CVC Capital Partners used AI to sell a Greek e-commerce business for €635m. The WSJ reported that prospective buyers were welcomed to talk to a chatbot versed on the deal, answering questions on financials and due diligence.

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