Lucy Stapleton

PwC is working with AI start-up Harvey on the technology, which will make “AI-customised models trained on the essence of deal-making” available to PwC’s deals practitioners and licensed to the wider market.

“It will work alongside M&A professionals, including investors, bankers, and advisors, to provide accelerated value and meaningful insights by collecting, processing, and interpreting large and complex datasets, streamlining document review and analysis, generating new ideas and solutions, and optimising and augmenting processes and workflows,” PwC and Harvey said in a joint announcement.

The announcement builds on the alliance between PwC’s Global Tax & Legal Services, OpenAI and Harvey, which will train and deploy foundation models for tax, legal and human resources services.

Lucy Stapleton, UK deals leader at PwC, said: “We are thrilled to be expanding our partnership with Harvey. This platform will be transformative for the M&A market, not only in terms of the insights it can generate, but also in the way it will simplify and enhance the deal process.

“One of the most important questions is whether an acquisition is worth pursuing. We expect to reveal greater value — unlocking more deals, extracting more value from them, and indeed reducing the number of failed deals too by using this platform to interrogate information and support our analysis.

“We believe the combination of the power of AI and the expertise of PwC presents a compelling offer for clients.

“Although the environment to do deals has been challenging this year, there is still pent-up demand and we expect activity to pick up when conditions stabilise. This new platform will be well placed to address the challenges and opportunities of both the current and future market environment.”

Winston Weinberg, co-founder and president at Harvey, added: “Expanding our partnership with PwC represents a significant opportunity to bring the power of AI to the M&A market.

“The innovative solutions we will create together will bring Harvey’s best in class AI technology together with PwC’s unrivalled experience in M&A to deliver a next generation of technology to this market.”