Featuring:
AI is changing how investors source, diligence, and decide on deals. Is that making deals faster, better, or both?
Recorded live at Seattle AI Week 2026, this PitchBook panel brings together leaders from venture capital, legal AI, and financial services AI to talk about what’s working right now.
Key takeaways
- AI output is only as good as the data behind it. Building agents is easy now. As Paul Jaeschke put it, “the hard part is, is that output any good?” The panel kept coming back to trusted, well-structured data and solid evaluation as what makes AI output reliable.
- Deals are getting faster, and possibly better. Weak deals get ruled out sooner. Data room reviews that used to take a week now take hours. Promising companies that once got lost in the pile are surfacing earlier.
- Judgment stays human. AI handles the informational heavy lifting, but people still make the call, especially at the earliest stages. In Chris Picardo’s words, the models “would make really poor venture capitalists.”
- The analyst role is changing, not going away. Junior team members are spending less time producing work and more time thinking. The skills that matter now are framing the right question and adding value on top of what AI produces.
- Real adoption takes more than licenses. David Armstrong described the “failure mode” as handing out a few seats and hoping. Firms that see results treat AI as a transformation, with clear ownership, governance, and incentives.
