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Comment by formercoder | Hacker News Reader

There’s a relationship between how liquid a market is and how easily it can be automated. There are very few humans on treasury desks, but M&A is still highly relationship driven. No algorithm is going to convince a CEO to sell their company or buy another.

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Thats not an accurate view of what automating M & A is going to look like. The future is CRMs, more data transportability, and generally improved tooling will change the 1 deal/month capacity of your rain maker M&A team of 8 to a team of 3 doing 6 deals/month. You don’t need to replace the whole flow with computers to add automation.

Completely agreed, that liquidity spectrum still holds though. Closer to 100% of treasury trading than M&A can be automated, but tools can certainly increase the efficiency of the M&A process and reduce headcount if demand doesn’t grow in kind.

M&A is being increasingly automated too. There are simply too many companies out there to run off of relationships alone. Pre-merger due diligence is mostly automated already.

Exactly. SV likes to brag how their tools are disrupting collaboration, reducing the need for physical presence and increasing automation is making jobs redundant but big money deals are always done in person, with a handshake at a dinner in a fancy restaurant. No amount of tech will ever disrupt this ritual.

Relationships were central to pit traders as well. Doing deals in the steam room was a cherished & central ritual.

It didn’t save them when the bots came.

Who needs CEOs when it's machines all the way down? Presumably two or more AIs will have some method of reaching consensus.

Yet...

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