Artificial Intelligence: the inexorable march
Every business everywhere is currently in the process of assessing the impact on it of AI. Equally every M&A market, including the UK mid-market is in the throes of necessary adjustment to accounts for AI’s influence on all those factors which contribute to modelling, risk assessment and valuation in the context of acquisition or investment.
Within the dataset analysed for this report, technology‑focused bolt‑on activity peaked in 2024 before dropping sharply in 2025. General nervousness over the breadth of areas where AI has the potential not only to enhance but directly replace products and services in the tech sector will have been partly responsible for that, together with the general trend our earlier reported data reflects. Within the tech sector, however, the SaaS market has been hit particularly hard.
TECH BOLT-ON ACTIVITY TBC
2021
2022
2023
2024
Research carried out by technology specialist boutique investment bank Silverpeak further indicates that across the SaaS sector as a whole valuations fell by an average of roughly 40% in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Historically that is an extreme short-term adjustment, uniquely in the case of AI resulting from change which is perceived as being long-term and increasing in effect over time, as opposed to e.g. a financial crisis or global pandemic, each of which has a predictable within reason end in sight.
There are conflicting theories as to whether AI has triggered an unusually short, sharp and recognized as unavoidable valuation expectation adjustment or a level of uncertainty and unpredictability which causes valuation for the time being to be particularly challenging. The former view would see the tech M&A market absorbing AI quickly into the multiple target assessment variables and focussing upon, for example, ownership and quality of AI accessible data and overall opportunities for AI business enhancement, meaning M&A gets done. The latter theory, though perhaps accelerating worry driven M&A in the sector, would otherwise result in value nervousness, pace of change concern and general commercial uncertainty continuing to cause some stagnation until a point of alignment in reached.
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Paddy MccGwire, Senior Partner, Silverpeak