How Multi-Agent AI Helped Private Equity Firm Evaluate More Deals

In private equity, time spent analyzing a deal is time that could be spent evaluating the next opportunity. But thorough investment analysis takes work. Associates must review deal documentation, analyze company and market data, and prepare Preliminary Review Memos (PRMs), while Managing Directors spend additional time reviewing findings and refining assessments.

AI can reduce that burden, but Thrive believes the real opportunity goes beyond automating individual tasks. It’s about rethinking how work gets done so teams can focus their expertise where it matters most.

Thrive recently partnered with a private equity firm to build a multi-agent AI workflow that automates deal documentation analysis and PRM generation. The solution saves approximately seven hours per run while helping the firm standardize its process, share institutional knowledge, and evaluate opportunities it might previously have passed on.

Building AI Around How Investment Teams Actually Work

The challenge wasn’t simply producing a report faster. It was automating a complex workflow without losing the structure and analytical rigor the firm relies on.

Thrive started with in-depth discovery sessions to reverse-engineer how the firm’s Associates and Managing Directors review deals. Thrive mapped the process from document extraction and data analysis through report construction, identifying how each step contributed to the final PRM.

Using those insights, Thrive developed a multi-agent AI workflow in which specialized agents handle individual sections of the memo, including:

• Company overview: Organizing key information about the target business.
• Competitive landscape: Analyzing the company’s market and competitive position.
• Management background: Compiling relevant information about the leadership team.
• Additional PRM sections: Supporting the other components of the firm’s review process.

The agents work together within an end-to-end workflow designed to mirror how the investment team already operates.

This reflects Thrive’s point of view on mid-market and enterprise AI: The best solutions don’t force people to adapt to technology. They make technology work around the business. By starting with the firm’s existing process, Thrive built automation that addresses a real operational constraint rather than introducing AI for its own sake.

From Time Savings to Greater Deal Coverage

The immediate impact is measurable. The workflow saves approximately seven hours per run, including five Associate hours and two Managing Director hours.

But the value extends beyond efficiency.

• More consistent analysis. A standardized workflow helps the firm produce PRMs with a more consistent structure and approach, reducing variation across manually prepared reports.
• Shared institutional knowledge. The firm’s established review process becomes part of a repeatable workflow, helping distribute knowledge across the team rather than relying entirely on individual employees to apply each step from memory.
• Expanded investment opportunities. With less time required to prepare each memo, the team can evaluate deals it might previously have passed on due to the effort involved. That creates opportunities to broaden deal coverage, deepen market knowledge, and identify investments worth further consideration.

AI doesn’t replace the judgment required to make investment decisions. It helps investment professionals spend less time assembling information and more time applying that judgment.

That’s the distinction between automating a task and improving a business process.

Applying Thrive’s Crawl, Walk, Run Approach

Thrive’s Crawl, Walk, Run approach helps organizations move from AI experimentation to practical, scalable business outcomes.

Crawl: Understand the pain to uncover the opportunity. Before building anything, Thrive worked with the investment team to document its existing PRM process, identify time-intensive activities, and understand what a useful final deliverable needed to include. Effective automation starts with the business problem, not the technology.

Walk: Build around a real workflow. Thrive translated that discovery into a multi-agent solution, assigning specialized agents to individual memo sections and coordinating them within an end-to-end process. The goal was to reduce manual work while preserving the firm’s established approach to analysis. Additionally, Thrive guided the organization through a firm-wide AI adoption journey, including training sessions on best practices to encourage wide-spread understanding and adoption.

Run: Scale the impact. With approximately seven hours saved per run, the firm can begin applying its newfound capacity to broader deal evaluation. The opportunity is no longer limited to producing individual memos faster. It’s about supporting more reviews, sharing knowledge more consistently, and making better use of the investment team’s time.

Scaling responsibly also means validating outputs, maintaining appropriate human oversight, and refining the workflow as business needs evolve.

The approach is intentional: establish a clear business case, demonstrate value in a focused use case, and expand based on what works.

Turning AI Into a Business Advantage

Thrive believes AI should be measured by what it enables an organization to do, not by how many tasks it automates or tools it deploys.

For this private equity firm, that means moving beyond faster PRM production to increase the capacity for deal analysis. For other organizations, the opportunity might be accelerating research, streamlining compliance documentation, or reducing the administrative work that keeps employees from higher-value responsibilities.

In every case, the starting point is the same: understand how the business operates, identify where time and expertise are being underutilized, and build AI around the outcomes that matter.

By combining process discovery with multi-agent AI, Thrive helped this firm save time, standardize its review process, and create room to explore more investment opportunities. Contact Thrive today to learn more about how AI integration can help your business reach its goals.