February 12, 2025

The Research Bottleneck Before AI, and What Replaced It

Every pitch starts with a profile: who runs the company, what changed in the last filing, who the incumbent advisor is. That step used to be the bottleneck. It rarely is now, for a specific reason worth naming.

The old workflow

A junior associate would spend two or three hours assembling a target profile: pulling the last annual report, scanning press releases, checking who signed the audit opinion, and summarizing it into a one-page brief. Multiply that across twenty prospects a quarter and it becomes a meaningful chunk of billable capacity spent on non-billable prep.

What changed, specifically

The task of reading a filing and extracting the handful of facts that matter, leadership changes, auditor changes, a footnote about a material weakness, is exactly the kind of structured extraction that current tools handle well. It is bounded, the source document is public, and the output is checkable against that same document.

That last point matters more than the speed gain. Because the source is public and stable, a reviewer can verify the summary in minutes rather than trusting it blind.

What has not changed

Judging which twenty prospects are worth profiling in the first place is still a partner-level call. So is deciding what a given fact means for the pitch, a new CFO might signal openness to a pitch, or might signal a mandate to cut outside spend. The tool surfaces the fact. A person still decides what it means.

Net effect on the week

The result is not that research disappears from a partner's week. It is that research shifts from something a team member spends hours producing to something a partner spends minutes reviewing and interpreting. That is a smaller, cleaner task, and it is the one that actually gets done consistently instead of skipped when the week gets busy.

Applying the same discipline to internal work

The same research-first pattern that speeds up prospect profiles works just as well for internal tasks, summarizing a long engagement letter template, preparing background for an internal meeting, or drafting a first pass at a practice-area memo. The common thread is that the task starts from a defined, checkable source rather than from an open-ended request, which is what makes the output trustworthy enough to use with only a light review.

Firms that extend this discipline beyond prospect research, to any task with a defined source document, tend to see the efficiency gain compound faster than firms that treat prospect research as a one-off use case.

A caution about moving too fast

It is tempting, once the research step speeds up, to also speed up the decision about which prospects to pursue, treating a longer list as automatically better. A longer list of researched prospects is only useful if the firm still has the partner time to act on the added volume thoughtfully. Match the size of the research pipeline to actual outreach capacity, rather than letting research speed alone dictate how many prospects are pursued in a given week.

Where this leaves a firm

None of this is complicated in principle, which is exactly why it gets skipped under deadline pressure. The question worth returning to before treating where AI genuinely saves time on client work as settled is what a careful reader would actually notice if the firm got it right. On the point raised above under “the old workflow,” the answer is usually specific rather than clever: filing-based research is a bounded, checkable task well suited to automation. Firms that build this expectation into how they train new associates find it easier to sustain once experienced staff move on, because the standard lives in a documented habit rather than in one person's memory. The gap between a firm that talks about where AI genuinely saves time on client work and a firm that actually practices it shows up over several quarters, not in any single engagement, and it tends to show up most clearly in the small, unglamorous checks that a client never sees directly but benefits from anyway.

It also helps to name, plainly, who is responsible for keeping this working once the novelty of a new tool wears off. Someone should own the point raised under “what changed, specifically,” check it periodically rather than assume it stays true on its own, and be the person a colleague asks when a new situation does not fit the pattern described here. Put simply: the net shift is from hours of production to minutes of review. That kind of ownership, named and specific, is a small addition to a firm's process, and it is usually the difference between a good idea that is followed for a month and a standard that actually holds up over a year of real client work.

None of this needs to be elaborate to be effective. A short, dated note in a shared file, reviewed at the next quarterly check-in, is usually enough to keep the responsibility from quietly disappearing when the person who first cared about it moves on to something else.

VIPMarketing Editorial