Intapp, a global company that provides cloud-based software tailored to legal, accounting and financial services firms, has unveiled DealCloud Activator, an AI-enabled growth platform designed to help professional services firms adopt and sustain successful business development practices. The platform, which combines artificial intelligence with behavioral science to guide professionals in their client relationship management, was […]
Intapp, a global company that provides cloud-based software tailored to legal, accounting and financial services firms, has unveiled DealCloud Activator, an AI-enabled growth platform designed to help professional services firms adopt and sustain successful business development practices.
The platform, which combines artificial intelligence with behavioral science to guide professionals in their client relationship management, was announced during the publicly traded company’s (NASDAQ:INTA) inaugural Amplify 2025 product event in New York City yesterday, alongside several other AI-focused enhancements to the company’s product suite, all focused on the theme of using AI to enhance firm growth and competitive advantage.
(Note: I did not attend the event in person but watched the live stream.)
Designed based on research that will appear in the forthcoming book The Activator Advantage: What Today’s Rainmakers Do Differently, DealCloud Activator aims to help firms better align business development efforts with strategic goals, successfully integrate new lateral partners, and drive sustained firmwide growth by embedding business development enablement into professionals’ daily workflows, the company said.
“Intapp DealCloud Activator breaks business development down from a nebulous concept into a handful of simple tasks each day,” said Erin Guinan, general manager of DealCloud. “It enables each professional to adopt and maintain Activator behaviors — driving consistency in BD activities, creating and maintaining connections, and delivering the right idea at the right time — at scale across the firm.”
‘The Activator Advantage’
During yesterday’s conference presentation, Laurie Saklad, Intapp’s vice president, legal industry, said that DealCloud Activator addresses two key problems: influencing professionals to adopt productive business development behaviors when command-and-control management doesn’t work, and giving leaders tools to monitor and adapt AI for effective coaching within their firm’s culture.
Laurie Saklad unveils DealCloud Activator and its Signals feature driven by behavioral science research.
The platform uses “nudges” — called “Signals” in Intapp’s product — grounded in behavioral science to encourage small, incremental improvements that accumulate over time, she told the audience. “Given the size of the firms that you all work in, even modest individual improvements can have a significant cumulative impact.”
In a video testimonial shown during the event, Mitchell Zuklie, chairman of Orrick, endorsed the activator approach, calling it “game-changing.”
“Intapp is coming along with a technology toolkit designed with these insights and that’s incredibly exciting,” Zuklie said. “There’s no better investment that we can make than helping our activators be more successful.”
Underpinning the design of the product is research (which Intapp helped fund) conducted by Rory Channer, co-founder of DCMI Insights and a co-author of The Activator Advantage.
Speaking at yesterday’s event, he said that professionals who follow the “activator” approach are 32% more successful growing books of business than non-activators. Every high-performing partner identified in their study used technology to support their business development efforts, he said, making the integration with DealCloud a natural extension of their research.
Among the features of DealCloud Activator described during yesterday’s presentation:
- Relationship and opportunity signals that alert users to changes in key relationships.
- Behavioral nudges providing timely reminders of best next actions.
- Tech stack integration with email and LinkedIn.
- Holistic data integration combining third-party data with proprietary firm history.
- Network management visualization.
- Personalized updates.
- Embedded coaching.
- Performance metrics dashboards.
Other Product Announcements
Beyond DealCloud Activator, Intapp announced several other enhancements to its product suite during the event, all focused on applying AI to drive growth for professional services firms.
These announcements started off with the unveiling of a redesigned user experience for Intapp products, which will first be rolled out in Intapp’s DealCloud product.
The new interface reduces visual noise, adds more human elements like contact photos and company logos, improves navigation, and incorporates AI assistance for key tasks, Sean McLeary, vice president, product experience, told yesterday’s audience.
This updated UX will be available in DealCloud sandboxes immediately, with phased rollout between May and August.
Enhanced Time Keeping
Beth Cuzzone, Intapp’s vice president of global growth marketing, previewed the next generation of Intapp Time, which features cloud-based AI capabilities to help firms reduce time leakage and increase revenue.
Beth Cuzzone discusses how Intapp Time can help firms increase revenue.
Among the new features of the system are an activity log that automatically captures daily work activities, voice-to-text functionality for creating time entries, and AI-powered compliance checking against client billing requirements.
These features could help firms capture millions in otherwise lost revenue, Cuzzone said during her presentation.
“Imagine all of the ways that our AI-driven time product will impact the velocity of time to cash at your firm. Said another way, imagine all of the revenue that we can help capture for your firm.”
This next-generation version will be released this summer, with no migration required. “We can just turn it on,” Cuzzone said.
AI Security
Richard Bowes, senior compliance growth director for Walls for AI, provided updates on that product, which is Intapp’s security solution for protecting confidential information when using AI and copilots.
New capabilities include managing confidentiality risks in Microsoft OneDrive, identifying and protecting sensitive information across Microsoft 365, and enhanced monitoring of oversharing risks, he said.
In a video testimonial about Walls for AI that was played during the event, Meredith Williams-Range, chief legal operations officer at Gibson Dunn, said, “There’s not another product on market that allows us to really protect and govern our data at the nuanced kind of scalpel-esque type of level that we are looking to do.”
Updates to Intapp Assist
Ben Harrison, president of financial industries and DealCloud, and Senior Product Manager Melanie Fisher spoke about enhancements to Intapp Assist, the company’s AI assistant. These include the launch of Smart Tags, which automatically identify companies and contacts mentioned in text, and Prompt Studio, which allows firms to develop prompts in order to tailor AI capabilities to their unique needs. Assist already includes a library of pre-developed prompts.
Harrison also interviewed David Handler, co-founder of Tidal Partners, who discussed how DealCloud has become his firm’s system of record and how AI features are helping make his team more efficient.
Another new Assist capability previewed yesterday was Assist Origination, an AI-powered tool to help firms find new deals, investors and clients. It will be available to customers starting in May.
“Assist with Origination transforms deal sourcing into a strategic advantage,” Rudy Saad, head of private capital markets at Intapp, said while demonstrating how it can be used by an investment firm. “It allows firms to focus on the best opportunities and act faster than ever before.”
While his demonstration was in an investment scenario, he emphasized that the tool is equally useful for law firms.
‘Intelligence Applied’
In remarks opening yesterday’s conference, Intapp CEO John Hall (pictured in the featured image at the top of this article) spoke about the conference theme of “intelligence applied.” He said that growth is the top priority for firm leadership across the professional services industry, and that Intapp’s mission is to enable firms in pursuing that mission.
“If you’re not growing, you’re dying,” Hall said, after showing a video montage in which three firm leaders said that exact phrase. “We didn’t script that,” he said, “but I think that moment really captures the thinking for firms in the industry. There really is, in this entire business model, a growth imperative.”
Because law firms compete based on their knowledge and intellectual capital, artificial intelligence is a critical component of future success, he said.
“It’s just self evident if we can successfully complement the human intelligence inherent in the firm with very tangible applications of artificial intelligence,” Hall said, “that won’t just make people more efficient but, in your business, AI might just be able to make people more competitive with stronger, better, more differentiating intelligence that forms the core of your firm’s strategy and value propositions and your appeal to investors and clients. This is what we mean by intelligence applied.”
Thad Jampol discusses the value of AI to professional services firms.
In his opening remarks, Thad Jampol, Intapp’s cofounder and chief product officer, outlined a framework for effectively applying AI to drive growth in professional services. He emphasized that the true value comes from applying AI to a firm’s unique intellectual capital — its relationships, experiences, and market understanding.
“Your collective relationships and experiences and dynamic understanding of what’s going on in the market are your IP, it’s the identity of your firm that drives your differentiation and growth,” Jampol said. “The problem is that most of all that stays locked in the heads of the professionals or at best in an email or a file somewhere. But what if we could get it all out?”
“… This is exactly what Intapp’s graph data architecture models and understands, and then we give it back to you, unlocking your firm’s intelligence so you can answer strategic questions that drive growth.”
The DealCloud Activator product is now generally available to Intapp’s legal clients, with the leadership dashboard component coming later this year. Intapp plans to roll out specific versions for other advisory groups in the future.
