Aadhib

Case study · In development

Building AI due diligence around evidence instead of answers

Due diligence rewards finding what is missing. That is the opposite of what a summarising model is good at, and it changes the whole design.

Role
Founder · Architecture · Engineering
Published
Reading time
1 min
Document analysisSource attribution
01

Context

Due diligence is hundreds of documents, a deadline, and a small number of things that genuinely matter buried among them. It looks like the ideal application for AI, and in one sense it is — the search cost is enormous and mostly mechanical.

02

Problem

The reason it is dangerous is that a reviewer cannot re-check everything the system reported as fine. That is the entire time saving. So any confident false negative — a system saying nothing is wrong with a document when something is — is invisible by construction, and lands at the worst possible moment.

03

Constraints

01
Findings must be checkable
Every output has to point at the passage it came from, or a reviewer cannot verify it in less time than reading the document themselves.
02
Dates change meaning
A document accurate two years ago is not a current fact. Flattening everything into the present tense produces confident nonsense.
03
Absence is signal
What is not in the data room often matters more than what is, and detecting absence is much harder than summarising presence.
04
Isolation is absolute
Due-diligence material is among the most sensitive a firm handles.
04

Approach

I designed the output to be evidence rather than conclusion: structured findings that each carry their source passage, as-of-date context attached rather than inferred, and organisation that supports item-by-item verification. The reviewer's job does not change — the cost of finding the items to review does.

05

Architecture

Document ingestionMaterial brought in with provenance preserved per passage.
Structured extractionFindings produced as discrete, checkable items rather than prose.
Source attributionEach finding tied back to the document and passage supporting it.
Reviewer outputOrganised for verification rather than for reading.
06

Solution

Evidence-first output: structured findings, source attribution on every item, as-of-date awareness carried through, and tenant isolation throughout. The system shortens the search and leaves the judgement where it belongs.

The failure mode nobody demos

Every due-diligence AI demo shows the system finding a problematic clause. The interesting question is what it does with two hundred documents where nothing is wrong, and one where something is — and whether the reviewer would notice if it missed that one.

That is not a question I can answer with a demo. It is a question about how I structure the output, and whether it invites verification or discourages it.

07

Lessons

  1. 01Optimise for verification speed, not answer quality. A finding a reviewer can confirm in ten seconds is worth more than a paragraph they have to trust.
  2. 02Summarisation is the wrong primitive for due diligence. The task is closer to search with citations than to reading comprehension.
  3. 03The failure that matters is the false negative, and it is the one nobody sees during testing because everything looks clean.
  4. 04Never let the output read as a legal conclusion. Organising evidence and assessing risk are different jobs, and only one of them belongs to software.

Stack

What it runs on

Document analysisSource attribution

The project

01MyAdvisor.ai Due Diligence
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