Due Diligence with AI: Shortcut the First Two Weeks of Any Deal

Every deal begins with a sprint through public information: regulatory filings, news coverage, executive backgrounds, competitor context, customer reviews, employee sentiment, and patent landscape. For deals that materialise quickly, this phase is where speed creates advantage — knowing the public record before the first meeting means you negotiate with context rather than building it on the fly.

What Public Due Diligence Actually Covers

The sources that experienced deal professionals mine first:

• SEC filings: 10-Ks, 10-Qs, 8-Ks, S-1s if public. Proxy statements for governance and compensation. 13-Ds for any activist positions.
• News and trade press: Coverage of the company, its executives, and its market over the past 3–5 years. Tone and narrative shifts often reveal inflection points.
• Patent landscape: What IP the target owns, what they're actively filing, and where the litigation history sits.
• Regulatory history: Any enforcement actions, consent decrees, or regulatory correspondence in their industry.
• Competitor positioning: How the target is discussed relative to competitors — product comparisons, win/loss mentions in sales reviews, feature gaps.
• Employee signals: Glassdoor and Blind reviews, LinkedIn employee tenure trends, hiring and attrition patterns.

Using AyeWatch for Continuous Deal Intelligence

The most effective use of AI monitoring in deal work is not reactive (setting up monitoring when a deal surfaces) but continuous (running background monitoring on likely deal targets and their markets so that when a deal surfaces, you already have six months of intelligence).

Set up topics for: "[Target company] news, regulatory actions, executive changes, and product announcements." Run it for 60 days before initial conversations. By the first NDA, you've already reviewed what a junior analyst would spend two weeks compiling.