‘Excited and terrified’: One of private equity’s top investors built an AI that knows every deal he’s ever done

James Brocklebank has spent nearly three decades making billion-dollar bets on companies most investors would never touch — carve-outs from struggling conglomerates, businesses buried inside bureaucratic giants, deals closed at the height of a pandemic. He has seen complexity and leaned into it. But nothing, he says, compares to what’s coming with artificial intelligence. “Excited and terrified in equal measure,” Brocklebank replied flatly when asked what he was most excited about in the world right now. Consider who’s saying this. Brocklebank is co-chair of Advent International, a global private equity firm that manages roughly $100 billion and has backed some of the most consequential corporate transformations of the past two decades — from Worldpay to Thyssenkrupp Elevator to a portfolio of defense technology companies that include Shield AI and autonomous naval vessel startup Saronic. Speaking on Goldman Sachs’s Exchanges: Great Investors podcast, he offered a candid window into how a top-tier investment firm is actually deploying AI — not as a marketing talking point, but as a tool already reshaping how deals get done. The centerpiece: something Advent calls the IC Robot. “This is an AI that has been trained on all of our investment committee papers over the last 13 years,” Brocklebank explained. “So, it’s ingested everything — all the deals that we’ve shown the committee. And interestingly, it has the perspective on what happened to the deals that we did, but also the deals that we didn’t do.” Most institutional knowledge in private equity lives inside the heads of senior partners or buried in files no one revisits. Advent has effectively digitized its own intellectual history — its wins, its misses, its assumptions — and turned it into a live analytical layer that interrogates every new deal that comes before the committee. When a new investment memo lands, the IC Robot reads it, cross-re