Every investment banking transformation initiative I have reviewed over the past five years shares a common thread: firms underestimate the complexity of intelligent automation deployment and overestimate their organizational readiness. A managing director at a major European bank recently told me their automation program was "ninety percent complete" after eighteen months, only to discover they had addressed the easy technical challenges while ignoring the difficult operational and cultural ones. The result was a system that worked in theory but failed in practice. What separates successful implementations from expensive failures is not technology selection or budget size—it is disciplined execution guided by a comprehensive implementation framework. This checklist represents lessons distilled from deployments across equity trading desks, M&A advisory practices, wealth management platforms, and capital markets operations. Intelligent Automation in Investment Banking req...