In a recent episode of Goldman Sachs Exchanges: Great Investors, James Brocklebank, Co-Chair of Advent’s Executive Committee, sat down with Alison Mass, Chairman of Investment Banking at Goldman Sachs. Together, they cover how Advent thinks about European markets, AI, and the deep sub-sector expertise that defines the firm’s approach.
Why Europe’s complexity is Advent’s advantage
Europe is a patchwork of 44 nations, dozens of regulatory environments, and multiple languages. For many investors, that’s friction. For Advent, it’s where the opportunity lives. Brocklebank explains why firms with boots on the ground see deals that others may miss, and why the structural inefficiencies of the European market can generate the kind of carve-out deal flow that Advent is built to pursue.
The IC Robot: Institutional memory to support investment committee discussion
Advent has built an internal AI tool designed to help investment professionals review historical investment committee materials and identify potentially relevant prior examples, patterns, and discussion points. When a new deal comes to the committee, the IC Robot can help stress-test the assumptions against Advent’s historical experience, flagging areas where a margin or growth assumption may merit
further discussion. It’s not a voting member and does not make investment decisions, but, as Brocklebank puts it, it’s “extremely powerful in terms of prompting discussion.”
Walking the walk on AI
Before discussing how Advent applies AI across its businesses, Brocklebank starts where he believes any serious transformation has to begin: internally. From hiring a Chief Data Science Officer and Chief Digital Officer before AI was mainstream, to building an early in-house large language model and now a single intelligence engine that works across all major AI platforms,
Advent has been working toward this for years. His view on what genuine AI transformation requires — organized data, real cultural change, and a move past isolated experiments to genuine transformation is worth hearing in full.
Deep sector knowledge applied globally
Since 2008, Advent has invested in 19 payments companies. By the third churn management project, Brocklebank says, you get pretty good at it. That depth of sub-sector knowledge — recycling talent, repeating playbooks, compounding institutional learning across geographies — is what Advent means by specialization at scale. And it’s a model the firm applies across more than 30 sub-sectors worldwide.
James and Alison cover more ground in the full episode, including Advent’s expansion into Asia Pacific, the firm’s early moves in next-generation defense, and what Brocklebank tells his own sons about building a career in the age of AI.
