AI workflow automation scales private markets operations as retail investors flood in

AI workflow automation is emerging as a critical solution for private markets as they undergo a structural shift. What was once the exclusive domain of institutional investors is now opening to thousands of retail participants, creating operational complexity that legacy processes were never designed to handle.

As private market firms confront mounting pressure to handle greater investor volume, faster reporting cadences and more flexible fund structures, the question is no longer whether to automate, but how to do it in a way that scales without sacrificing governance. That challenge defines the mandate of Bob LeBaron (pictured), head of the Workflow Center of Excellence at Neuberger Berman Group LLC. The goal: redirect skilled professionals away from administrative burden and back toward the work only they can do.

“We have a lot of examples where we might have a horizontal function that is supporting all of the business,” LeBaron said. “Let’s let the investment team invest. Let’s let the deal team source deals and really seek the alpha within their own organizations as opposed to just doing something that’s not really their strong suit.”

LeBaron spoke with theCUBE’s Dave Vellante at Appian World 2026, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how AI workflow automation is reshaping operational scale in private markets and the path toward more interoperable, AI-native process orchestration. (* Disclosure below.)

AI workflow automation unlocks capacity in private markets

At Neuberger Berman, the convergence of several forces — agentic AI, retail investor demand and pressure for near-real-time data reporting — is compressing the operating window for manual workflows. The firm has historically maintained a direct ratio between assets under management and employee headcount, but that relationship is changing as AI workflow automation increases the carrying capacity of each employee, according to LeBaron. Industry analysts have noted that private market operations are particularly data-intensive, with unstructured documents from fund agreements to investor onboarding forms posing persistent automation challenges.

“Could the same number of employees support double or triple or quadruple the [Assets Under Management] if we build it in a way to scale?” LeBaron said. “AI is able to do some of the things that a human would normally do and only report back the exceptions that somebody should need to care about. It also, in some cases, is doing things that just weren’t done before that maybe should have been done or they were kind of nice to have. Now that we have AI, we can actually do those things.”

Neuberger Berman uses Appian Corp.’s platform for two core workflows: deal closing in its private equity and private debt businesses, and funded investor onboarding, which spans master funds, feeder funds and aggregator entities across multiple investor closes, LeBaron explained. The platform also gives third parties — fund administrators and outside counsel — secure logins with real-time deal status visibility. A key area of near-term AI investment is document extraction, where unstructured subscription documents from dozens of outside counsel firms, each with slight formatting variations, present a barrier that previously defied economies of scale.

“Generally the information is the same, but that format is a big barrier of entry to give to any analyst,” he said. “Now that you have AI, it’s much easier to be able to standardize, to structure that data and to be able to really start to unlock the wealth that you were just sitting on, which is just a whole bunch of data, but nobody could structure it and harness it before.”

Looking ahead, the conversation turns to the future of AI-native process orchestration. The goal is an architecture flexible enough to plug into any AI ecosystem as it evolves, according to LeBaron.

“I want to be able to see a natural path to be able to integrate … with really any type of AI ecosystem,” LeBaron said. “How can I utilize the workflow engine and how can I utilize the AI and the agents as individual process models?”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Appian World 2026:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Appian World. Neither Appian, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE