The Limits of Traditional Due Diligence
Ask any fund manager what slows down a deal, and you’ll hear the same answer: time.
A single opportunity can demand more than 80 hours of analyst work, and because each analyst brings their own approach, the evaluations often lack consistency. By the time the investment memo is pulled together, weeks have passed; and in many cases, the market has already moved on.
These days, faster isn’t enough! Due diligence also hinges on how much your team can take on. When your team is buried in one opportunity, it’s harder to evaluate others. That means fewer deals get a fair look, and potential winners slip by.
For firms trying to maintain institutional-grade rigor while competing for quality opportunities, this is a real bottleneck.
How AI is Changing the Game
AI isn’t replacing the judgment of seasoned investors. What it does is take the manual grind off the table. Instead of analysts spending hours extracting numbers from PDFs or formatting committee memos, AI systems handle that heavy lifting.
Here’s what the new process looks like:
✔️ Data extraction happens automatically.
Upload the documents, and within minutes the system pulls out the key figures, terms, and red flags you’d normally spend hours searching for.
✔️ Documents get organized intelligently.
No more tagging, indexing, or sorting files by hand. Everything is structured for you, so your team can focus on analysis, not admin work.
✔️ Evaluations follow a consistent framework.
Every deal runs through the same set of standards, which means results are comparable across analysts and opportunities. You get uniformity without extra oversight.
✔️ Committee memos are generated automatically.
Instead of starting from scratch, your analysts receive a polished draft that’s ready for refinement and validation. The grunt work disappears, but the critical judgment stays in-house.
✔️The system learns your preferences.
Over time, the AI adapts to your firm’s way of thinking: how you weigh risks, what details matter most, and which signals influence your decisions. The more you use it, the sharper it becomes.
The impact is hard to overstate: faster turnaround times, more consistency in decision-making, and the ability to handle more deal flow without stretching your team.
Case in Action: Terra Rossa and OakTech’s Due Diligence Copilot
The benefits of AI sound compelling on paper, but the real test is how it performs in practice. Terra Rossa’s partnership with OakTech shows how shifting from manual, inconsistent workflows to an AI-powered process can fundamentally change the pace and quality of investment decisions.
The Challenge
Terra Rossa, a family office investing across multiple asset classes, was running into the same walls many firms face.
Due diligence for each opportunity took more than 80 hours of analyst work, and investment decisions stretched to 3–4 weeks.
Because the process wasn’t standardized, outcomes varied depending on who handled the review. Documentation wasn’t consistent either, which made it harder to maintain an institutional-grade process. This resulted to limited capacity, slower decisions, and missed opportunities.
The OakTech Solution
OakTech stepped in with its Due Diligence Copilot (DDC), an AI-powered platform built specifically for investment evaluation.
Here’s what changed:
- Data extraction and analysis were automated.
- Documents were processed and organized intelligently.
- Evaluations were scored against a standardized framework.
- Investment committee memos were generated automatically.
- Learning algorithms adapted to Terra Rossa’s unique investment preferences.
The Results
Analysts could now spend less time buried in documents and more time focusing on what matters: interpreting results and making sound investment calls.
The outcomes were concrete:
- 75% less manual analyst work (cut from 80+ hours to 20 per deal)
- 60% faster decisions (from 3–4 weeks to 8–10 days)
- 40% increase in deals evaluated per quarter
- 85% analyst satisfaction with the new workflow
For Terra Rossa, partnering with OakTech Systems and adopting AI gave the firm the bandwidth to look at more opportunities without sacrificing rigor.
Moving Beyond Manual
AI isn’t about replacing analysts. It’s about letting them spend time where its most needed: on strategy, risk analysis, and building conviction.
Manual due diligence will always have a role, but relying on it as the backbone of the process is no longer sustainable. Deals move fast, LPs expect rigor, and firms that can’t keep up risk falling behind.
The firms that win the next decade won’t just be the ones with the best networks or the most capital. They’ll be the ones that adopt smarter, more scalable ways of evaluating opportunities. AI is already making that possible.
The question for most managers isn’t “if.” It’s “when.”
