Following a bountiful second half of 2025, which drove up aggregate annual deal value by 40% compared to the previous year, the M&A market is on its way to another banner year.
Surveyed last November by Bain & Company, 80% of 303 M&A executives in 12 countries said they expected to sustain or increase deal activity in 2026, according to the consulting firm’s recently published research report.
The report listed the ingredients of the 2025 surge and consequent optimism as: improving macro conditions; a growing backlog of private equity and venture capital assets ready for exit; and a widespread recognition that many traditional business models have reached the limits of their historical growth engines.
As previously reported by CFO.com, the first quarter of 2026 was even more bountiful for M&A than had been expected based on the 2025 results. That was especially so in the market for mega-deals worth $10 billion or more.
Also, this year, expect to see M&A practitioners continue to adopt artificial intelligence tools. In 2025, according to Bain’s research, the proportion of them using such technologies more than doubled, to 45%.
“Now they’re using it in tangible ways across more touchpoints in the M&A life cycle,” Bain wrote. “Just a few years ago, AI was largely limited to sourcing, screening and diligence. Those remain the highest areas of AI deployment, but more companies have begun relying on AI for later stages of the deal cycle — namely, transaction execution, integration and learning.”
About one-third of surveyed dealmakers said they deploy AI systematically or are redesigning M&A processes to take advantage of AI, and more than half said they expect AI to significantly impact how deals are done.
The report noted that technology disruption was one of three major forces that became “impossible to ignore” during 2025, the others being post-globalization and shifting profit pools. This year, however, “these forces will make companies move from awareness to action,” Bain predicted.
M&A leaders, for their part, “will revisit foundational strategic assumptions, rethink portfolio boundaries, and make bigger, bolder decisions about what capabilities they must own vs. access,” the report asserted. “M&A will play a central role in this transition.”
As for post-globalization, in 2026 and beyond, companies will make bolder moves to double down on parts of their global footprint and minimize exposure to others, according to Bain. “M&A and divestiture will be critical tools to rapidly execute that realignment.”
And with respect to shifting profit pools, Bain offered as an example the way direct access to customers via streaming and social media “disintermediates traditional players and spurs M&A.”
