The Acceleration Is Here

I round up the most relevant AI-in-finance news - the deals being done, who’s rolling out what, and what’s actually working on the front lines

…so I want to try something different. In addition to the usual digest, I'm bringing in views and opinions from the people on the front lines of this technology. I think of this newsletter as a conduit between the world of AI and finance, and as is often (sometimes) the case, the cutting edge is being discussed on Twitter. So I want to bring some of that here.

My recent realisation: the worlds of tech and finance are going to merge and get closer than ever before. In 2026, the rest of the world is going to start waking up to what the tech world is already seeing. It's not using Copilot to ask a question about your PowerPoint. Entire workflows and industries are going AI-native. Jobs are going to change.

But to kick things off, a conversation I had over Christmas dinner that I can't stop thinking about.

In This Week’s Issue:

From The Trenches

The Christmas Conversation That Won't Leave My Head

We were sat around the table, just finished eating, and the conversation turned to work. As it does. And then naturally to AI. And then to me, as someone building in the space.

Over the past few weeks I've been going deeper into Claude and Claude Code. And I've been circling around this realisation that it's really here. This isn't the future anymore. It's now. Working with these tools every day, you start to see where this is all heading.

But when the conversation turned to me for comment, I realised I didn't even know where to begin.

It's like being shown a vision of the future but not being able to describe what you see. The impact feels so large and has been so all-consuming of my thoughts these past few weeks. And I've found myself struggling to translate what I'm seeing to people who aren't deep in this stuff every day.

Then someone said: "Oh yeah, we just rolled out Copilot. We get it."

And I thought: if you think Copilot is AI, you have no idea what's coming.

I don't say that to be dismissive. Most people are consuming AI passively. They ask ChatGPT a question, get a mediocre answer, and conclude the technology is overhyped. They're not wrong that the experience is often underwhelming. But they're experiencing the floor, not the ceiling.

The ceiling requires curiosity and time. Most people don't have either. And that's not a criticism. Everyone's busy. Everyone has their own expertise to focus on.

But I now tell everyone I know: if you have a business, or even if you don't, you should be spending time working in AI right now. Not "exploring" it. Not "keeping an eye on it." Working in it. Building with it. Understanding what it can actually do.

The gap between people who understand this technology and people who don't is widening fast. And the people building this stuff are saying it out loud. Here's what they said this week.

What The Builders Are Saying

The cutting edge of AI isn't in press releases. It's on X/twitter. Here's what the people building this said this week.

Andrej Karpathy on the "magnitude 9 earthquake" hitting programming (Dec 26) - Co-founder of OpenAI, former head of AI at Tesla, and one of the most respected voices in machine learning. When Karpathy talks about what's happening in AI, people listen.

Key quote: "I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored... I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available in the last ~1 year. It's a magnitude 9 earthquake."

Why this matters: Software engineers have had 18 months of AI-native tools transforming their workflows. They're the canary in the coal mine. And the canary is screaming.

My take: If one of the guys at the absolute forefront of AI feels behind, what does that tell you about the rest of us? Software engineers were first. Deal professionals are next.

Aaron Levie on Jevons paradox and why AI means more work, not less (Dec 26) - CEO of Box, a $4B+ enterprise software company. One of the more thoughtful voices on how AI is actually changing work inside large organisations.

Key quote: "Jevons paradox is coming to knowledge work. By making it far cheaper to take on any type of task, we're ultimately going to be doing far more. The vast majority of AI tokens in the future will be used on things we don't even do today: the contracts that wouldn't have been reviewed, the research that wouldn't have been discovered."

Why this matters: Jevons paradox is the idea that when you make something more efficient, you don't use less of it. You use more. Coal got more efficient in the 1800s and consumption exploded. The same thing is about to happen with knowledge work. The question isn't "will AI replace workers?" It's "what work will we do that we never could before?"

My take: The deals that didn't get done because diligence was too expensive. The add-ons that didn't get sourced because nobody had time. The market maps that never got built. That's where AI creates value.

Jack Clark on the parallel worlds forming in 2026 (Dec 24) - Co-founder of Anthropic, the company behind Claude. He's one of the people actually building the frontier of this technology.

Key quote: "If you have intellectual curiosity and some time, you can very quickly shock yourself with how capable modern AI systems are. But you need that magic combination, otherwise you'll consume AI like most people do – as a passive viewer of unremarkable synthetic slop. By summer 2026, I expect many people who work with frontier AI will feel as though they live in a parallel world to people who don't."

Why this matters: This is the co-founder of the company that makes Claude telling you that two parallel worlds are forming. One where people understand what this technology can do. One where people don't. The timeline isn't 5-10 years. It's 2026-27. That's one to two deal cycles.

My take: The good news: the barrier to entry is curiosity and time, not technical skill. The gap is widening every day, but it's not too late to cross it.

News Digest

Goldman CEO: AI Means More Hiring, Not Fewer Jobs

David Solomon told Sequoia Capital's podcast this week that AI advancements "actually free up the capacity to invest more in people for our businesses that scale with people." He suggested teams working on deals that take years to come to fruition will benefit most.

A Bloomberg survey of senior financial services professionals this month found the majority expected headcount to increase in the next three years thanks to AI.

Why it matters: This is Jevons paradox playing out at the industry level. When you make deal work more efficient, you might not need fewer bankers. You might do more deals.

My take: Solomon is making the optimistic case. AI doesn't shrink the market, it expands what's possible. But there's a catch. Whether headcount increases or decreases depends on whether the people can keep up with the technology. The firms that figure out AI will do more deals with the same headcount. The firms that don't will watch their competitors pull ahead.

Read more

This Week in AI M&A:

Nvidia acquires Groq for $20B in licensing deal (Dec 24) - Nvidia structured this as a licensing agreement rather than outright acquisition to avoid antitrust scrutiny. 90% of Groq's 300 employees joining Nvidia. Groq's inference chips run LLMs 10x faster than competitors. Jensen gets the talent without the regulatory headaches. Creative dealmaking in the AI chip wars.

ServiceNow acquires Armis for $7.75B in stock (Dec 23) - Caps ServiceNow's $12B M&A spree for 2025. Armis provides AI-powered OT/IoT security. Investors are spooked by CEO Bill McDermott's acquisition pace. Stock dropped on the news. When your M&A strategy makes the market nervous, that's a signal.

Other Cool Stuff I’ve Read of Seen This Week:

China issues draft rules to regulate human-like AI (Dec 27) - Beijing wants AI chatbots to remind users every two hours that they're talking to a machine. Also requires intervention when users show "signs of addiction." Imagine Clippy but he's legally mandated to ask if you're okay.

AI was behind 50,000+ layoffs in 2025 (Dec 21) - Major tech companies citing AI in restructuring announcements. The cuts are here.

PwC: Knowledge workforce will look like an "hourglass" (Dec 2025) - As agents take on "midlevel" work, you end up with lots of juniors, lots of seniors, and a hollowed-out middle. The associate role is in the crosshairs.

Karpathy's "2025 LLM Year in Review": "Vibe coding" crossed the threshold (Dec 20) - Programming via English, forgetting code exists. Y Combinator says 25% of their Winter 2025 batch had 95% AI-generated codebases. The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet.

CNBC: AI market to splinter between "monetizers vs manufacturers" (Dec 25) - Companies spending on AI vs. companies making money from AI. Different investment cases entirely. Know which one you're betting on.

Acquisition Intelligence is a weekly newsletter on AI in M&A for finance professionals, private equity investors, investment bankers, corp dev teams, and deal-makers.

For questions, feedback, or to share what you're seeing in the market, reply to this email.

P.S. I'm Harry, co-founder of DealSage. We're building an AI-native deal intelligence platform to help professionals turn their institutional knowledge into better decisions. If you're curious what we're up to, check out dealsage.io or just reply here