Unleashing the Power of AI for M&amp;A: Insights from Industry Experts
Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a game-changing force for mergers and acquisitions. In a recent panel, our CEO and Co-Founder Gabe Stengel spoke with industry experts Claudionor Coelho, Chief AI officer for Zscaler, Javier Sáenz, VP of Business Development at Alantra, and Andrea McGuirt, VP and Head of Business Development and Capital Markets at Growth Curve Capital, to discuss how bespoke AI can accelerate various M&amp;A processes for banks, corporate M&amp;A teams, and investors.
&nbsp;
The AI Opportunity in M&amp;A
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">&#8220;The reality with ChatGPT, with Copilot, with any of these tools is they&#8217;re like interns&#8230;The more you can guide them&#8230;the more they will improve with you.&#8221; &#8211; Gabriel Stengel</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">&#8220;We are currently seeing how we can benefit from third-party data providers and external databases that apply AI to their models and extract useful information from that.&#8221; &#8211; Javier Sáenz</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">&#8220;We are very eager to summarize information, put it onto a PowerPoint, and have a readout to the more senior team members who are not as close to the specific data sets.&#8221; &#8211; Andrea McGuirt</li>
</ul>
&nbsp;
Streamlining Deal Sourcing with AI
One area where AI is making waves is deal sourcing. AI-powered platforms can identify potential acquisition targets, uncover hidden opportunities, and facilitate data-driven decision-making. By leveraging third-party data providers and external databases that apply AI, firms can gain a significant advantage in sourcing deals.
&nbsp;
Enhancing Due Diligence with AI
AI&#8217;s potential extends far beyond deal sourcing. As Andrea McGuirt highlighted, AI can streamline due diligence and underwriting processes by summarizing vast amounts of data quickly and efficiently. This allows analysts and associates to focus on higher-level analysis and strategic thinking, accelerating the overall process.
&nbsp;
The Importance of Human Expertise
While AI offers incredible efficiency gains, the human element remains crucial. As Andrea McGuirt noted, &#8220;Human judgment is going to be critical.  Wanting to look another person in the eye, shake hands and agree to do something special together, that&#8217;s not going to be replaceable by AI from my perspective.&#8221;
&nbsp;
The Future of AI in M&amp;A
The future of M&amp;A lies in striking the right balance between human expertise and AI-driven efficiency. As Gabriel predicted, &#8220;10 years from now you&#8217;re going to be emailing an AI analyst and asking for the deck or the first draft or the outline of the materials or the target list, and you will be used to getting it in 30 seconds.&#8221;
Firms that embrace AI as an accelerant, rather than a replacement for human expertise, will be well-positioned to gain a competitive edge in the ever-evolving M&amp;A landscape.
&nbsp;
Rogo: Leading the AI Revolution in M&amp;A
At Rogo, we’re at the forefront of this revolution. We’re deploying our finance-specific generative AI solution that understands the way bankers, investors, and financial services professionals work. Our goal is to work with firms to build the tools they need to work with unprecedented efficiency and clarity. 
&nbsp;
Join the AI Journey with Rogo
Are you ready to navigate a future with AI at your firm? Discover how our bespoke AI can guide your roadmap to accelerate your deal processes, enhance decision-making, and drive your success.
<a href="https://www.rogodata.com/demo/">Contact us today</a> to learn more about how Rogo can revolutionize your M&amp;A operations.

Unleashing the Power of AI for M&A: Insights from Industry Experts

Welcome to the second installment of our &#8220;Meet the Team&#8221; series, in which we introduce Rogo employees to share a little bit about their background, why they joined Rogo, and what excites them most about coming to work. Interested in joining the Rogo team? See our openings <a href="https://www.rogodata.com/careers/">here</a>.
<h2>Meet the Rogo team: James White, VP of Sales</h2>
Quick Bio:
I’m James, a Houston native whose passion for tech was realized at age 15 when I started selling and repairing computers at CompUSA. Every paycheck went into building my dream gaming rig to play Half-Life 2. I also opened a Roth IRA and invested in NVIDIA stock solely because it was the priciest part of my computer build. At UC Berkeley, I majored in Economics but my favorite course was Physics for Future Presidents. Post-graduation, I had stints at Apple and a prop trading firm arbitraging semiconductor fabrication equipment before finding my calling at software startups. I’ve been a part of two successful exits, the latest being Sentieo, a financial search engine acquired by AlphaSense in 2022.  
Other Facts: 

<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Lived in India for a year after studying Hindi/Urdu </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Photographed giant manta rays while scuba diving in Mexico </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Named my dog Zelda after the princess</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Favorite travel destination: Galapagos Islands</li>
</ul>
&nbsp;
Q: What excites you the most about working at Rogo?
The large language model space is still in its infancy, with groundbreaking papers and AI startups emerging weekly. Rogo’s tech often feels like magic, during demos it enables companies to dream about what’s possible while also making it easy to implement solutions today. Rogo has amazing engineering talent, and I thrive in high engineer-to-sales ratio environments where the product evolves rapidly, and demos leave prospects awestruck. 
&nbsp;
Q: What has surprised you the most about working at Rogo?
The staggering demand for generative AI and organizations’ willingness to experiment with it. Finance and banking sectors are often viewed as sluggish and risk-averse, but they’re also focused on maintaining a competitive edge through innovation. The fear of being left in the digital dust is real and is leading to a lot of momentum for Rogo. 
&nbsp;
Q: What’s your favorite part of the Rogo platform?
We all know the current limitation of LLMs is their tendency to hallucinate. I’m most impressed by Rogo’s approach to grounding responses with citations. 
I also find the workflows and automations incredibly compelling. Since most users won’t become prompt engineers, offering an interface to generate consistent and predictable outputs for common tasks and work streams is crucial.
&nbsp;
Q: Tell us about what you like to do outside of work.
I love being outdoors, immersed in nature and wildlife. This past year, I went trekking in Sumatra to spot orangutans, went scuba diving among Komodo National Park’s coral reefs, and climbed the tallest mountain in Taiwan. When I can’t squeeze in epic adventures, you’ll find me taking my dog Zelda to nearby beaches, shark-spotting with my drone, or checking off popular local hikes on AllTrails.

Meet the Rogo Team: James White, VP of Sales

Rogo was founded to help financial services firms leverage the power of generative AI technology. To us, this means incorporating the data that matters the most to you and working with firms to develop tailored solutions. Read more below about our edge in the financial services space.
Interested in learning more about how Rogo can help your firm? <a href="https://www.rogodata.com/demo/">Reach out to us</a>.

How is Rogo specifically built for finance use cases?
We’ve fine-tuned large language models to better understand the breadth of financial services – everything from M&amp;A advisory to hedge fund investing and private equity / credit deal execution. Our models are trained on extensive financial data. On top of that – we keep our platform up-to-date with completely fresh information. Unlike other models with knowledge cut-offs, Rogo ingests millions of earnings transcripts, company filings, exhibits, investor presentations, and news articles on a daily basis.

03 LEVI Q1

Rogo vs. Other GenAI Tools
Our platform provides the unprecedented level of customization that financial services firms need. Rogo integrates firms’ internal documents like memos, PPTs, and contracts, allowing users to search directly on top of their most important, proprietary info. Users can also export results directly into their firm’s templates, simplifying workflows end to end. Rogo offers custom AI automations, designed to reduce complex financial processes to a few clicks.
&nbsp;
Can I trust Rogo’s information?
Trust Rogo’s accuracy, which is 2.42x better than ChatGPT for financial use cases, according to Patronus AI’s <a href="https://www.patronus.ai/announcements/patronus-ai-launches-financebench-the-industrys-first-benchmark-for-llm-performance-on-financial-questions">FinanceBench</a> &#8211; the industry’s first benchmark for testing how LLMs perform on financial questions. (Their work was recently cited in this <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/19/gpt-and-other-ai-models-cant-analyze-an-sec-filing-researchers-find.html">article</a>.)
Every research result in Rogo is produced with in-line citations for each aspect of the answer, allowing you to audit everything. If Rogo can&#8217;t find a source, it won&#8217;t provide an answer, thereby limiting the potential for hallucination.

Blog Bar Chart

Is my data safe with Rogo?
Rogo maintains the highest data security standards, coupled with best-in-class cloud security and platform resiliency to protect your most sensitive information. Read more about our safety &amp; security protocols <a href="https://www.rogodata.com/safety-security/">here</a>.
We partner with the providers you already trust to bring state-of-the-art generative AI to your firm, securely.

Group 1 (1)

Rogo FAQs: Learn More About How We’re Disrupting Financial Research

Welcome to the first installment of our &#8220;Meet the Team&#8221; series, in which we&#8217;ll be introducing Rogo employees to share a little bit about their background, why they joined Rogo, and what excites them most about coming to work. Interested in joining the Rogo team? See our openings <a href="https://www.rogodata.com/careers/">here</a>.
<h2>Meet the Rogo team: James Checca, Data Engineer</h2>
Quick Bio:
I am Rogo’s first Data Engineer! 
I grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, and attended Rutgers University: New Brunswick, where I majored in Computer Science and minored in Math and Physics. In college, I mostly spent my weekends either frequenting “basement shows” where the local live-music scene flourished, or competing in Super Smash Bros: Melee tournaments. I graduated in 2020 during the Covid lockdown, and started my first full time job as a Data Engineer at Citadel in February of 2021. I worked there until January 2023, sat out my garden leave, did some contract consulting work for a few months, and started at Rogo in January 2024.
Some random other things about me:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">I am a 3rd degree black belt in Taekwondo</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">I have a metal plate and 12 screws in my left ankle from a skateboarding accident in 2016</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">In 4th and 5th grade I was the leader of a Drum Corps that played halftime shows for sports teams including but not limited to the Knicks, the Celtics, and the NY Giants. We also played the opening ceremony for the U.S. Open of Tennis in 2008, where we opened for the Jersey Boys and Earth Wind &amp; Fire</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">I am color-blind</li>
</ul>
&nbsp;
Q: What excites you the most about working at Rogo?
What excites me the most about working at Rogo is being able to work on diverse, difficult, and intellectually stimulating problems that exist on the cutting edge of the young, rapidly evolving, and increasingly accessible field of generative AI. It’s exciting for me to be on the forefront of an inflection point in technological history, and work on something that is proving to significantly impact the way people learn, work, and build things.
&nbsp;
Q: What has surprised you the most about working at Rogo?
What’s (pleasantly) surprised me the most about working at Rogo is how much I like my colleagues. Not to say I haven’t liked past colleagues, or that I go into new jobs expecting to dislike my colleagues, but the adoration I have for my new team goes above and beyond what I’ve ever experienced in the past. 
Not only has everyone been super cool/relatable (which goes a really long way, especially on a small team), but every single person who works here is a BEAST at what they do. The talent density here is incredibly high, and it makes working at Rogo extremely fulfilling and intellectually invigorating.
&nbsp;
Q: What’s your favorite part of the Rogo platform?
LLMs are mind-blowing in general, but I think my favorite part of the platform is PDF Chat. I’ve always been super interested in NLP and linguistics, and the fact that I can upload a huge file and then instantly have a “conversation&#8221; with it about its contents is really cool to me.
&nbsp;
Q: Tell us about what you like to do outside of work.
In the past few months I’ve gotten really into bouldering. It’s great exercise, and I find the puzzle/problem solving aspect to be super engaging/fun/rewarding.
I’ve always loved video games, and spend a good amount of time (probably too much) on my PC when I’m at home.
I play a lot of different games, and the type of games I’m into changes quite a bit over time. A few examples of some of my favorite games of all time include but aren’t limited to: Super Smash Bros Melee (for the gamecube), Fallout 3, Elden Ring, Portal 2, CSGO, Hades, Celeste, and Diablo 4. Recently I’ve been playing a lot of Baldur’s Gate 3. 
I’m also a big fan of live music of any kind, and I like to snowboard.

Meet the Rogo Team: James Checca, Data Engineer

Thank you to Fundamental Edge for including Rogo’s CEO and Co-Founder Gabe Stengel as a panelist in your recent AI Roundtable!
<a href="https://www.fundamentedge.com/">Fundamental Edge</a>, a buy-side analyst training firm, hosted an AI Roundtable as part of its Analyst Spring Training Conference. Alongside Gabe, panelists included Michelangelo D&#8217;Agostino, VP of Machine Learning at <a href="https://www.tegus.com/">Tegus</a>, and Ran Zhao, Co-Founder &amp; CEO at <a href="https://www.onwish.ai/">Onwish</a>.
Topics discussed include:
<ul>
<li>Latest on AI in the fundamental investing space</li>
<li>How investors are incorporating AI into their fundamental equity research process</li>
<li>Leading AI tools for the fundamental investor</li>
</ul>
Listen to the roundtable <a href="https://www.fundamentedge.com/ai-roundtable">here</a>!
&nbsp;
If you’re interested in learning more about how Rogo’s AI solutions could help your firm, we’d <a href="https://www.rogodata.com/demo/">love to chat</a>. We’re also hiring – see our <a href="https://www.rogodata.com/careers/#positions">open roles</a> and get in touch.

Rogo CEO Featured in Fundamental Edge AI Roundtable

Last week, Rogo had the opportunity to co-sponsor <a href="https://promptlayer.com/">PromptLayer’s</a> first Prompt Engineering Tournament, alongside <a href="https://companyventures.co/">Company Ventures</a>, <a href="https://www.rabbit.tech/">Rabbit</a>, and <a href="https://www.getbasis.ai/">Basis</a>. 
The event consisted of a 3-round tournament to find the best prompt engineer in NYC! Participants were asked to come up with prompts to achieve varied purposes: avoiding a PR crisis, doing some homework, and giving financial advice. Each prompt was assessed with an evaluation system and given a score to select a winner! <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7173815112774881280/">Read more about the event here</a>.
Even if not everyone can match the tournament champions&#8217; prompting prowess, several basic tips can enhance anyone&#8217;s prompting skills, which we’ve compiled below.
&nbsp;
What is Prompt Engineering?
Prompt engineering is the process of crafting inputs (prompts) in a way that guides an AI to generate the desired outputs or responses.
&nbsp;
Basic Prompt Engineering Tips:
Be specific: It’s important that prompts precisely convey the intended request or question. Vague or overly broad prompts can lead to ambiguous or irrelevant responses.
Include context: It always helps to provide relevant background information and details before diving into your main request. This “contextual priming” can help the AI understand the context that would make the answer most useful and applicable to your needs, especially when dealing with complex or niche subjects.
Linked Prompting: For more complex inquiries or tasks, consider using a series of linked prompts. Start with a foundational prompt and use the response to build subsequent, more detailed prompts. This approach, often referred to as &#8220;chain prompting,&#8221; can help guide the AI through a logical progression of thought or analysis, leading to more comprehensive and nuanced outputs.
Define any ambiguous terms: In cases where a term or concept might be ambiguous, add in clarifying details to ensure the AI understands the intended meaning.
Leverage RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems: If you know that an AI tool is retrieving sources to find the answer to your query, help the system out by giving hints about what information would make sense to go out and find, like expected data sources and applicable filters. 
Indicate format: If you’re looking for a specific format or structure for the response (e.g., a list, a summary, a table, etc.), include that in your prompt.
Utilize markdown: Markdown, a lightweight markup language with plain-text formatting syntax, can be a powerful tool for instructing AI tools to organize responses in line with certain formatting expectations. For example, you can use bullet points, headers, or numbered lists in your prompt, and the model can then mirror this formatting. 
Iterate: Use your first prompt and the response to make improvements! Often, prompt engineering involves an iterative process, and initial responses can help you refine and adjust subsequent prompts for better outcomes.
Utilize Meta Prompting: Engage in a dialogue with the AI about the prompt itself. Ask the AI to critique or suggest improvements to your prompt. This meta approach can uncover insights and optimizations that you might not have considered, leading to more effective prompting strategies.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Rogo’s AI solutions could help your firm, we’d <a href="https://www.rogodata.com/demo/">love to chat</a>. We’re also hiring – see our <a href="https://www.rogodata.com/careers/#positions">open roles</a> and get in touch.

Prompt Engineering: Tournament Overview and Key Tips

Rogo was featured last week on Morning Brew’s Our Future podcast, hosted by Michael Sikand and Simran Sandhu. The hosts cover what Rogo is building, who the platform is helping, and how it can save you time.
“What&#8217;s really cool about this company is it&#8217;s a very B2B focused play, and that financial companies, [they have] all of their own methodologies, they have their own proprietary data sets, they have their own histories of trading. They have a lot of bespoke information, and that&#8217;s what they [Rogo] are building is this turnkey solution specifically designed for each of these financial firms to get the most out of their data.”
Listen to the full episode<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/she-raised-%24187-000-000-from-sam-altman-at-age-26/id1695893302?i=1000649008745"> here</a> (or watch it <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&amp;v=n1a8AMbq948&amp;embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.morningbrew.com%2F&amp;feature=emb_imp_woyt">here</a>).
If you’re interested in learning more about how Rogo’s AI solutions could help your firm, we’d <a href="https://www.rogodata.com/demo/">love to chat</a>. We’re also hiring – see our <a href="https://www.rogodata.com/careers/#positions">open roles</a> and get in touch.

Rogo Featured on Morning Brew’s Our Future Podcast

Our CEO and Co-Founder Gabe Stengel appeared on Scott Galloway’s Prof G Media’s podcast, hosted by Ed Elson, to discuss Rogo, the future of AI in financial services, and entrepreneurship. See an excerpt below, and listen to the full episode<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-prof-g-pod-with-scott-galloway/id1498802610?i=1000647814136"> here</a> (or watch it <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPG2arMH7Qw">here</a>).
If you’re interested in learning more about how Rogo&#8217;s AI solutions could help your firm, we&#8217;d <a href="https://www.rogodata.com/demo/">love to chat</a>. We’re also hiring – see our <a href="https://www.rogodata.com/careers/#positions">open roles</a> and get in touch.
&nbsp;
Ed Elson, Prof G Media: I want to start with the question that I think most of Wall Street would want to ask you, which is, “Is AI going to replace bankers?&#8221;
Gabe Stengel, Rogo: No, I think bankers would actually be happy if it could replace a lot of the PowerPoint and Excel work that they do, but the reality is that we&#8217;re a long way away from full automation. We&#8217;re a helpful tool. We make people smarter. We make gathering materials quicker. We make putting together PowerPoints and research memos a little bit more efficient. We&#8217;re not replacing anyone.
Ed: Are you sure that a banker should believe you when you make that statement? Tell me more about why you&#8217;re not replacing anyone.
Gabe: We’re replacing work, we’re not replacing people. Even in recent history, five years ago, before COVID, you probably had investment banking analysts, after staying up all night creating a pitch deck, they would go print it out, bind the books, deliver the books to their managing director and partners’ apartments. That would take a few hours. No one&#8217;s doing that anymore because everything&#8217;s virtual. It&#8217;s not like these bankers are working less, right? They&#8217;re just filling up their time doing smarter, more interesting things.
When I was a banker, I spent a lot of time doing very interesting, thoughtful work at Lazard, and that&#8217;s why I loved it. And then there was occasionally work that was not so thoughtful and not so interesting, and we&#8217;re helping get rid of that.
There&#8217;s a lot of examples throughout history of automation creating jobs, right? If you look at the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-ama-april2023.html?">A.T.M. example that folks like Ezra Klein</a> bring up often of when A.T.M.s got invented – actually what happened was there were more bank tellers than ever over the coming three decades because banks became more efficient to operate commercial branches, and so they expanded. I think what you&#8217;ll see in investment banking and in investing writ large is it&#8217;s going to become more efficient to operate these businesses, and they&#8217;ll want to expand.
Ed: Give us an example. You were a banker and you said that there are some services that you were doing that were meaningless.
Gabe: Here&#8217;s a great example. You cover a certain subset of companies. When they release earnings, you just want to write a quick update for everyone on your team saying, what did they hit? What did they miss? What are they saying about M&amp;A? Are they interested in M&amp;A? What are people in the space saying? What are the analyst reactions? That can take a few hours to write. That can get automated. And now what you can spend your time doing is being thoughtful about what does this earnings mean for us? Should we engage? Should we present new acquisition opportunities to them? Instead of spending a lot of time synthesizing publicly available information and putting it in a little email.
Another example is just benchmarking, right? Every growth equity and VC investor needs to know, &#8220;What does great net revenue retention look like at Snowflake, at Procore, and all sorts of businesses?&#8221; What they&#8217;re doing right now is having an analyst benchmark that on a quarterly basis so that they can reference it in podcast and reference it in IC memos and so on. That shouldn&#8217;t be done by hand anymore either. 
Ed: What kind of work do you think bankers will be doing? If they&#8217;re not doing all the things that you just described, what kinds of opportunities would you say this opens up? 
Gabe: Why do people use M&amp;A bankers? And just to set the stage a little bit, what is an M&amp;A banker, right? An M&amp;A banker is not making investments for anyone. They&#8217;re advising CEOs on when they want to sell their company or buy another company. They&#8217;re offering real thoughtful advice, and that&#8217;s the work they&#8217;ll continue to do. And when you&#8217;re offering really thoughtful advice, you have to have evidence to back it up, materials to back it up. Rogo helps make gathering that evidence a lot easier to prosecute more deals, advise more companies, offer smarter insights, and offer maybe more products, right? If you were just offering M&amp;A advisory as a service before, maybe now that’s easier for you to do with your team of 100. And you can also offer some consultation style work that McKinsey does, too, or some geopolitical advisory work as well. And the opportunity to expand your service and enrich it is now kind of endless.