The Uncomfortable Bit: Your Own Corp Dev Team.

Parts 1 and 2 of this series looked outward — at the advisors you hire and the targets you evaluate. Part 3 turns inward, to the Corp Dev function itself. This is the most uncomfortable section. It is also the most important.

The 12-month window

If the firms you hire and the firms you evaluate are reorganising around AI-native operating models, your own team is exposed in both directions: overpaying for AI-washed incumbents, and under-valuing genuine AI-native firms whose financials do not yet reflect their structural advantage. The remedy is not to wait for clarity. It is to move now, deliberately, and collaboratively. Twelve months — not five years — is the horizon that matters.

Why loss aversion runs the room

Morgan Housel's Same as Ever (2023) makes the precise point: the world changes constantly, but people do not. Loss aversion — the finding that we are more motivated to protect against loss than to pursue gain — explains most of the resistance to AI inside professional services teams.

The 55-year-old partner, who has built a career on being the most senior person in the room, is responding to AI differently from the 25-year-old, who sees it as an accelerator before they have a career to protect. Both responses are entirely rational, given where each person stands. A Corp Dev leader who treats the resistance as irrational, or as a culture problem, will fail to manage it.

The conversation I had with my own team

When we came back from those engagements where we had seen the "firms of the future" up close, I had an honest conversation with my own team. I told them: we have seen the future. Your role is changing — and neither of us knows exactly how. So let us start redesigning it together now, so you can ride this wave rather than be overwhelmed by it.

I also told them something that demonstrated this was not personal: I know that our own business model will be defunct within a few years if we do not adapt.

That conversation became an internal team-model redesign. That redesign became the paper this series is drawn from. The firms and teams that treat this as urgent, specific, and collaborative — rather than theoretical, distant, and top-down — are the ones that will retain the people capable of doing the work.

What changes for the function

The specific shape will vary by Corp Dev team. The direction will not.

• Analysts become operators of AI workflows, not producers of decks. The artefact is the same; the production cost is a fraction.
• Associates and VPs become Delivery Leads — orchestrating the AI-enabled diligence, integration, and value-creation workstreams. Less time managing junior bandwidth, more time on judgement calls.
• Heads of Corp Dev become accountable for an operating model their own predecessors never had to design.

None of this happens by accident. It happens because someone in the leadership chair decides to redesign deliberately, with the people whose roles are changing, and on the timeframe the market is actually moving on.

People First, still

M&A has always been a People First endeavour. AI makes that more true, not less.

The team that you are about to acquire, the team that is going to do the integration, and the team that is sitting around your own table reading this — all three are made of people responding to the same disruption, from different starting points, at different phases of the same cycle. The leaders who treat that as the central problem, rather than a side-effect of the technology, are the ones who will come out the other side intact.

← Back to Part 1: The Pyramid Is Dead. Meet the Pod.  |  ← Part 2: AI-Native or AI-Washed?

The full paper, The Team and Operating Model in the Light of AI, is available as a free download on our Resources page. To discuss any element of it — a Tech DD, an integration design, or a team redesign — get in touch.