How We Evaluate AI Tools for Private Capital

1. Who Writes the Guides

Dr. Leigh Coney writes or reviews every guide. He founded WorkWise Solutions, holds a PhD in how humans interact with emerging technology, has published sixteen research papers on AI adoption and governance in private capital, and has run 30+ engagements with PE, private credit and family office firms.

That background shapes what the guides care about. A tool that demos well and then goes unused is a bad purchase, so adoption, data handling and fit with how your team already works get as much weight as features.

2. How a Tool Gets Into a Guide

A tool makes a guide when four things are true:

• It does a job that private equity, private credit or family office teams actually do, such as spreading financials, tracking covenants, drafting memos or reporting to LPs.
• It is on the market now, with a public product description, not a waitlist or a slide.
• Its maker publishes how it handles customer data, or will say so in writing.
• A reader could buy it this year without building a relationship with us first.

We include tools we would never implement ourselves, and we leave out tools we like when they don't fit the job the guide covers. Guides compare categories first and products second, because the category decision is usually the expensive one.

3. What We Compare

Every comparison asks the same six questions:

• Fit for the job. Does it do the specific task the guide is about, or a general version of it?
• Data handling. Where does your data go, is it used for training, and what is retained under which plan?
• Integration. Does it work inside Excel, Microsoft 365, your data room or your fund administration system, or beside them?
• Pricing. Is the price public? If not, we say so rather than guess.
• Evidence. Is there public evidence of use by firms like yours?
• Exit. What does leaving cost you: data export, retraining, contract terms?

Where facts change fast, such as model versions, plan names and acquisitions, the guide says what was true on its date and hedges what we could not confirm.

4. What Money Cannot Buy

No vendor can pay to be included, ranked, described or left out. There are no affiliate links in the guides. WorkWise takes no referral fees and no reseller margin, and it sells no software licenses.

If a vendor named in a guide ever becomes a WorkWise client, that page will say so, next to the vendor's name. The rule is simple: if a relationship would change how you read the page, you get to know about it.

5. Where WorkWise Appears in Its Own Guides

WorkWise is an AI consulting firm. It builds custom AI systems and sells assessments, training, governance work and a retainer, all at published prices. Sometimes one of those is a real alternative to the software a guide compares: a firm with bespoke covenant definitions might be better off building a system than bending a platform.

When that is true, the guide says so, and WorkWise appears under three rules. It is labeled as the publisher of the guide. It is named alongside the other ways to get the same result, never alone. And it is never ranked above a tool.

Everything else on the page, the tool descriptions, the comparisons and the answers to neutral questions, is written as if WorkWise did not exist.

6. Our Partner Programs

WorkWise is a Microsoft AI Cloud Partner, an OpenAI Select Partner and an Anthropic Claude Partner, and is part of IBM for Startups. We work across Microsoft 365 Copilot, ChatGPT Enterprise, Claude and Gemini, so when a guide compares those assistants, we are in the programs of three of the four companies it compares, and you should know that.

None of these programs pays WorkWise to recommend a product. When a client asks which assistant to standardize on, the AI Readiness Sprint answers with a platform decision memo tested against the client's own documents and workflows.

7. Corrections and Updates

Vendors and readers can report an error to Contact@workwisesolutions.org. We check the claim, fix what is wrong, and change the page's updated date. A vendor who disagrees with an opinion gets the same answer as anyone else: we will fix facts, and we will not sell the opinion.

Each guide shows the date it was published or last updated, and the buyer's guides carry the year they apply to in their titles.