How professional services firms can learn to embrace rather than fear AI
UpSlide is a leading AI-enabled automation add-in for Microsoft 365, supporting financial and professional services businesses globally in over 60 countries. Diane Dumas, head of product at UpSlide, talks about her mission: to help the financial and professional advisory sector work better through automation and AI.
What made you decide to work at UpSlide?
I’ve personally experienced the pain of trying to create perfectly formatted content within Microsoft Office in previous professional roles, so I knew how frustrating it could be. I’d also seen the chaos created when internally built tools are shared between analysts without adequate training or support. It was very appealing to be part of the solution to these problems.
From a product point of view, it’s exciting to work on SaaS tools used daily by hundreds of thousands of users for their key deliverables.
Last but not least, the culture, leadership, colleagues, BCorp, and self-funded approach of UpSlide is exciting. I joined almost six years ago, and the rapid evolution of AI technology continues to bring great opportunities to keep growing with the company.
The automation/AI software landscape is constantly shifting. How are you keeping pace with innovation in the industry?
It’s evolving extremely fast. Staying ahead is a challenge for every SaaS player, and we’re no exception. UpSlide is committed to using AI to deliver transformative value and better ways of working that simply weren’t possible in the past. Internally, we’ve invested in upskilling—training our teams, leveraging the right models, at the right time, with secure infrastructure, whether hosted by our clients or by ourselves.
Our product and client teams stay obsessively close to our clients, and we share dozens of insights every week. We use this valuable intelligence to help us understand clients’ pain points, and also their hopes, frustrations, and reactions to emerging AI tools. We also look at other industries for inspiration. Parallel innovations can be adapted for our clients and their workflows.
With AI tools predominantly supporting research and content production, we’ve noticed an increasing issue for senior team members tasked with final reviews and quality checks. This growing bottleneck is causing issues —especially for those senior team members on the client side. So that’s where we’ve focused our latest efforts: building tools that support this critical review phase. We’re introducing pragmatic ways to track changes between two versions of due diligence and provide an AI-powered consistency review of pitch decks. The response from clients has been overwhelmingly positive.
How has technology changed the working lives of your clients in recent years? And is this change all positive?
As financial advisory firms, banks, and private equity funds compete in an increasingly crowded market, improving operational efficiency has become a top priority. A major barrier to this is time-consuming, labor-intensive manual processes. But in the new age of automation technology, these manual processes are already an outdated way of working that can damage the commercial performance of a firm.
AI and automation technologies reduce the time spent on low-value tasks, freeing time for strategic work. They also cut hiring costs by retaining talent through more fulfilling roles, boost revenue by reallocating saved hours to billable work and mitigate risk by automating updates and ensuring compliance.
However there are also issues created by the AI explosion in the last few years, bringing a new layer of complexity for our clients. They must navigate multiple providers, differentiate between trusted solutions that exist now and what might be coming down the line. Firms must also choose third party SaaS solutions that prioritise security or leave themselves open to increased risk.
For those working in the fast paced world of mergers and acquisitions, what are the key benefits to using UpSlide’s software?
Put simply, we help them produce top-tier, client-ready pitches and reports faster with AI and automation. Tasks that would have taken hours in the past are changed forever - which is why our software is now an essential tool for successful deal teams. It frees up at least 8 hours every month for our clients, much more in some cases, time that can be spent on strategy or data analysis.
We spend lots of time talking to clients about how generative AI is supporting their work – and where it could do more. The main challenges are quality and brand alignment. They want to be able to keep figures and content consistent across slides and documents with no errors or contradictions, using fewer steps and fewer tabs.
We could see that although AI generated content does a lot of the heavy lifting for juniors by drafting client materials, it wasn’t providing the same level of support to the senior team members who have to review and quality check this content. This creates a review bottleneck as the easier it is to produce first draft content, the harder it becomes to ensure all content is high quality and client ready as there’s more to review.
Our software helps to relieve this bottleneck by accelerating final sign-off, enhancing accuracy and reducing the risk of reputational damage. By supporting collaboration and making the review process much simpler we’re taking the pressure off senior team members too.
UpSlide has grown substantially since it was founded 14 years ago, working with hundreds of firms such as KPMG, Deloitte, and BNP Paribas. What is the future for the company?
We’re at a really exciting stage of our international growth journey. As a company, we’re debt-free and expect to see significant growth year on year. We’ll continue to scale up in a financially sustainable way, using our strong culture and reputation to attract and retain talent.
Our close relationships with clients and partners in the financial and professional services industry will also drive our growth as we help them meet the challenges that lie ahead. Despite all of the many changes in the financial services sector, what our clients care about remains the same: producing original thoughts and accurate data, showcased with consistent, high quality branding. They trust us because we help them to achieve this on a daily basis.
