Automate Due Diligence with AI

Due diligence has historically been the most expensive clerical task in the world. We have been paying people £300/hour to perform what is essentially sophisticated pattern matching. AI shifts this from 'Discovery' to 'Decisioning.' You no longer pay for the time it takes to find a clause; you pay for the expertise required to decide if that clause is a deal-breaker. The real second-order effect here is 'Continuous Diligence.' Historically, you only did DD during a transaction because it was too expensive to do otherwise. Now, smart operators run AI scans on their own businesses quarterly. This creates a 'transaction-ready' state where you aren't scrambling for six weeks to clean up your data room when an exit opportunity appears. Don't let an AI do the final sign-off, though. AI is brilliant at identifying what is there, but it can still struggle with 'silence'—detecting what is missing from a dataset requires a human who knows what a complete picture looks like. Use the AI to find the needles, but keep your hands on the magnet.