6 Surprising Findings From Our Corporate Development AI Survey

For decades, rigorous due diligence and disciplined decision-making have underpinned the most successful corporate development (corp dev) teams. While those fundamentals haven't changed, the technology supporting them has. How are acquirers rethinking their playbooks in the age of artificial intelligence (AI)?

According to AI in M&A Due Diligence and Integration Planning — our newly published survey of senior corp dev professionals and large private acquirers conducted with the Transaction Advisors Institute — almost all acquirers are using or piloting AI for use in M&A due diligence and integration planning. The report also explores other areas where AI adoption is accelerating, what's holding organizations back and what the most successful organizations are doing differently.

Here are six key takeaways.

1. AI is expanding beyond document review

The most established AI use cases are still centered around document analysis, contract review and data extraction. But corporate acquirers are beginning to expand their AI programs into other strategic areas of the deal process.

One of the fastest-growing use cases is market research. More than half of survey respondents are already using or piloting AI to quickly understand unfamiliar industries and competitive landscapes, dramatically reducing the time required to evaluate new opportunities.

2. Dealmakers are automating even more administrative tasks

The ability to synthesize large volumes of information and automate workflows is also helping deal teams streamline the time-consuming administrative tasks associated with managing data rooms and stakeholder collaboration.

More than half of respondents have Q&A automation on their roadmap. With the right AI platform, deal teams can automatically route questions to subject matter experts (SMEs), flag redundant questions, draft questions and answers, and identify inconsistencies in seller responses. An even larger percentage of deal teams are exploring ways to track diligence workstreams and manage documents with AI tools, reducing the back-and-forth email exchanges that slow deals down and increase the risk of data leakage.

3. Productivity — not headcount reduction — is the real objective

Much of the public conversation around AI is focused on headcount reduction, but the research tells a different story, with fewer than ten percent identifying this as a high priority. For now, it seems corporate AI initiatives are making teams more productive, not reducing their size.

The data also indicates that dealmakers are thinking broadly about AI’s potential impact. More than half of acquirers are prioritizing at least nine different strategic outcomes, including:

• Shifting staff toward higher-value tasks
• Reducing internal staff workload
• Reducing reliance on external consultants
• Alleviating friction in buyer-seller collaboration
• Exploring what AI can make possible

4. Governance remains the biggest obstacle

Despite strong momentum, many organizations continue to face significant implementation challenges.

Compliance requirements, confidentiality concerns, access controls and trust in AI-generated outputs remain the primary barriers slowing deployment. In addition, AI budgets and purchasing decisions are often managed centrally, limiting M&A teams' ability to experiment with new technologies. These findings underscore the importance of leveraging secure, fully governed platforms that align AI data access and outputs with data room permissions.

5. AI adoption is growing — and so is trust

Despite accuracy and security concerns, our research shows that AI adoption has increased significantly across core diligence workflows — and trust in the technology is improving alongside it.

Since 2024, the percentage of corporate acquirers using or piloting AI for legal agreement review has nearly tripled, while adoption for diligence workflow management has risen from 13 percent to 50 percent. At the same time, nearly nine in ten respondents expect trust in AI-generated work to improve over the next one to two years as the technology matures and organizations gain more experience using it.

6. Agentic AI could prove even more transformative than GenAI

As generative AI (GenAI) continues to gather momentum, a new wave of innovation is beginning to emerge: agentic AI workflows capable of acting with greater autonomy. Rather than simply generating answers in response to prompts, agentic AI is designed to independently execute complex, multi-step tasks with limited human intervention.

Early adopters are already building AI agents that continuously scan the market for opportunities, automate quality of earnings (QoE) analysis and coordinate diligence workflows from end to end with minimal human oversight.

The path forward

Even by technology standards, AI is evolving at an extraordinary pace. In just two years, corporate M&A has progressed from limited experimentation to widespread adoption, with organizations already looking beyond GenAI toward autonomous agents and increasingly sophisticated workflows.

For firms ready to put these ideas into practice, Intralinks DealCentre AI™, powered by Link™, the industry’s only AI engine purpose-built for M&A, provides a secure foundation for AI-enabled dealmaking. Our end-to-end platform helps teams analyze documents, streamline diligence workflows, automate repetitive tasks and preserve institutional knowledge across transactions, turning each deal into intelligence that potentially improves the outcomes of the next.

For deal teams that want to stay ahead, now is the time to partner with a technology provider that combines AI innovation with the governance, security and expertise today’s M&A transactions demand.

Download the report to benchmark your organization's AI strategy, explore the latest adoption trends and discover how leading corporate acquirers are accelerating diligence and integration planning.