A fork in the road

This is a moment you may be familiar with.

You’re working through diligence, sifting through piles of documents in your data room. You need to find some specific numbers to answer a question, but it’s taking too long. Your deadline is approaching. Pressure is mounting. And through it all, you keep getting assigned new tasks.

You’re tired. You’re frustrated. You’re starting to panic.

You need to move faster and you need help to do it.

You make a decision. You pick a path.

You download documents from your data room. You upload them to an external AI platform. You ask a few questions and get the numbers you’ve been looking for. You return to the data room. You submit your findings. Now, you can move on to your next task and forget about it.

Right?

But what happens when you’re asked to verify your answer? Can you trace it back to the source and confirm the context? And is that activity still connected to your governed deal record?

What if your project admin asks you for tracking information? What if you need defensible records for an audit?

You can’t produce those. When you downloaded documents from your data room and uploaded them to an external AI platform, you broke the audit chain and now can’t provide accurate tracking information.

Once a deal document is downloaded and uploaded to an external AI platform, it leaves the governed data room environment. Your team no longer has the same visibility into how it is accessed, retained, or used to train AI models.

Now your buyers are losing confidence. Because of one decision, you may have just put your deal in jeopardy.

In your journey through diligence, you took a sharp turn from where you should be headed.

How could this have gone differently?

Taking a detour

The moment your documents left the data room, there was a break in your audit trail.

Downloading permissions can be important for due diligence. There may be moments where you need to decide whether to share additional information with serious buyers during disclosure. But these permissions need to be used carefully and intentionally. Even when a deal is close to being closed, balance needs to be achieved: transparency versus security.

Every time you download a document, you create another copy of it. That means sensitive information now exists in an unprotected file that can't be tracked.

Data rooms are designed to govern sensitive information. When you remove it from that environment, you lose control. Your deal data may now be vulnerable to leaks or cyberattacks.

Sharing information with a buyer is part of the diligence process. Uploading sensitive deal documents to an external AI platform introduces a different kind of risk.

Once documents are uploaded to an external AI platform, or large language model (LLM), you may have less visibility into how the data is accessed, retained, used, or shared.

Consider this: someone asks the AI you used a question about business finances or M&A transactions. The AI could respond with any number of examples it’s pulled from the broader internet. If you’re unsure about the AI's data retention and training, it could also potentially reference data that’s been uploaded to it – like yours. It could surface information you were supposed to keep confidential.

If you’ve uploaded deal documents, you can't guarantee that information won't end up somewhere else.

That lack of oversight can lead to less control and weaker governance. You may have less visibility into where deal data goes and how it is used, and activity outside the data room can create gaps in the audit trail.

The AI platform saved you time. But it also caused new problems you now need to solve.

To strike the balance between security and productivity, the clear solution is to use AI that works directly inside your data room.

With built-in AI, your confidential data stays confidential and your audit trail stays solid.

You also know exactly where your answers come from.

Hitting a roadblock

AI platforms pull data from millions of sources and try to draw conclusions from all of that information. AI is being widely adopted because it speeds up work, but with such a large amount of data being processed so quickly, there’s a chance of hallucination.

Hallucination is when an AI platform provides inaccurate or untrue information but presents that information as fact. Because hallucination can happen, it’s crucial to verify the sources and context that feed into a response.

But it can also be difficult to narrow in on the sources.

You ask an AI platform to sift through a dozen documents. At first glance, the information it surfaces looks right. You take it and run with it, quickly moving on. But when you need to apply your findings to high-stakes diligence, they may not hold up.

If you’re unsure of your findings and you can’t back them up with cross-referenced sources, where can you go from there?

In diligence, an answer isn’t really an answer unless it has a source.

Inaccurate information without concrete sources will slow or completely stall diligence. Now, instead of gaining time, you’ve lost important progress.

When AI is contained within your data room, it can only reference your documents for responses.

With every answer it provides, you can easily check which document it sourced data from and get that extra layer of verification.

You can see its exact thought process. You can be more confident in its conclusions.

You can move through diligence more quickly without sacrificing accuracy.

Finding your bridge

You shouldn’t have to choose between saving time on manual tasks and protecting your deal.

Timelines are tight. The market is more competitive than ever.

But to successfully proceed from diligence to closing, you can’t just move quickly. You need security and accuracy. Buit-in AI within a data room can give you that, but how exactly does it work?

If your data room provider has AI built into its platform, then that means:

• It falls under the same rigorous security and permissions that the data rooms do
• It’s built to understand dealmaking and how M&A teams really work
• It can understand M&A language and plain language
• It can only source from documents inside your data room that the AI user has access to
• It provides citations for its conclusions, showing you a clear path of how it got to its answer

Any permissions you’ve set for your data room will remain in place. You can get the answers you need fast and surface new insights without taking sensitive deal documents outside a data room.

If your project admin asks for an audit trail, you can easily produce one. You know exactly where the documents have been. You know exactly who has seen them and what they’ve been used for.

You can give buyers greater confidence that sensitive deal documents remain secure and controlled throughout the diligence process.

When you use the AI assistant to search, it will understand M&A terms and goals. It will know what you’re looking for with minimal prompting. It will give you the context and sources you need to verify responses.

And if your security and accuracy safeguards are in place, then you can start putting the AI to work.

Since the assistant gets what M&A teams need, it can help you advance your deal.

You can build workflows from a single prompt or smooth out any places you’re seeing friction. You can focus on getting to close while AI completes your manual tasks and surfaces information you may have missed.

All within the secure walls of your data room.

Datasite’s AI assistant made for M&A

An AI-enabled data room needs to be secure, smart, and accountable to make an impact on your work.

Datasite’s Blueflame AI assistant is the AI tool that is trained on M&A, made for dealmakers, and always provides citations for its answers.

Blueflame brings AI intelligence right to your deal. But it doesn’t just read your data. It understands it. It knows how deal teams work and what you need to get through diligence.

There’s no need to take your documents outside of the data room for answers. Everything you need is inside of your Datasite data room, working alongside you.

Speed to closing with confidence. Get the Blueflame AI assistant with Datasite.