A market that rewards scarcity Talk to any banker this summer and you will hear the same message: deals are down, dollars are up. Through the first half of 2025 global transaction volume has slipped another 9%, continuing the slide that began when interest rates spiked. Yet the cash committed to those fewer transactions has climbed 15%, producing the widest gap between count and value in more than a decade. Capital, in short, is concentrating in a handful of assets that look resilient enough to weather uncertainty and productive enough to outrun it. Capital’s increasingly regional heartbeat

Most of that money is staying close to home. 91% of North-American dry powder was redeployed inside the region during the first six months of the year, up 5% from 2024. The same home-bias pattern shows up in Europe, while Asia-Pacific investors are doing the opposite—sending twice as many dollars to the United States as they did a year ago. The explanation is as simple as it is powerful: acquirers believe U.S. companies sit further up the AI-maturity curve. Paying a premium to own that capability, even on another continent, feels safer than investing locally in firms that will demand years of catch-up spending.

How “quality” changed its meaning

For decades, quality in M&A meant three things: steady cash flows, a management team that knows how to protect them, and a growth plan the board can believe in. Those ingredients still matter, but the recipes have changed. Today steady cash flow is more likely to be the by-product of predictive maintenance bots than of a well-worn human process. Strong management is demonstrated by executive sponsorship of an AI roadmap, not by the size of the IT budget. And credible growth plans are increasingly written in the language of proprietary data loops and model retraining cadences. Put bluntly, firms that already treat AI as infrastructure are the ones commanding the frenzied auctions everyone is talking about.

Structural forces behind the flight

Three macro trends explain why the AI-mature asset is winning. First, geopolitical tension has sharpened the focus on supply-chain repeatability and onshore data governance; companies that have automated the relevant monitoring and compliance workflows rise to the top of the screening pile. Second, thematic capital is pouring into horizontal enablers such as artificial intelligence in much the same way it once chased cloud and mobile. Third, corporate boards are fighting a capital-allocation tug-of-war: nearly every large company is plowing record budgets into internal AI transformation, leaving fewer discretionary dollars for post-acquisition technology retrofits. Buying an asset that already runs on modern pipelines solves the dilemma.

What “AI-ready” looks like inside the data room

An AI-ready target generally exhibits four tell-tale features. Its critical processes—finance close, demand forecasting, contract review, or customer-success triage—are instrumented end to end, with models in production rather than in pilot. It owns a clean, well-licensed data fabric that can feed those models and expand over time. It employs teams that know how to move prototypes to production safely, complete with monitoring, governance, and retraining schedules. And, perhaps most important, the leadership team can explain how each model influences a line item on the P&L.

How different stakeholders should respond

Founders who hope to sell within the next two years need to evaluate their own maturity now, not after a banker’s teaser is on the street. Gaps identified early can still be closed; gaps discovered during confirmatory diligence usually result in price chips or busted deals. Private-equity buyers, for their part, should underwrite not just historical margins but the incremental EBITDA that a best-practice AI program can unlock once the company is in portfolio. Corporate development teams inside strategics need to tighten their screening criteria, favoring targets whose pipelines can be fused with the acquirer’s data lake within the first ninety days.

A closing thought The flight to quality that defines today’s market is, in reality, a flight to AI maturity. Investors have concluded that owning modern, automated operations is cheaper than building them from scratch, even when the entry multiple looks eye-watering. If you are unsure where your firm sits on the spectrum, an independent, rapid AI opportunity assessment can provide the answer long before the data room opens. Maai Services Group can complete that review and deliver an actionable roadmap—so you enter negotiations knowing exactly what you are worth.