Hi everyone,

Who would have guessed the first post for this list was 2 years ago today? At that point the list was intended to be sent daily to show the tech matters as a part of the acquisition due diligence.

Since there, there have been a lot of conversations across with many different people. From the PE and VC space where the due diligence is looking at a company’s current business to evaluate how likely it’ll be replaced by AI or can leverage AI. Then there are the service providers leveraging AI to summarize and review the tech components of a company prior to close.

In short, not the direction or focus I was expecting.

Yes most of these developments have cropped up within the last year showing how rapid things change.

Yet I cannot help, but think there is something critical being missed.

Just like my English teacher ranted about my using the Cliff Notes version of Shakespeare, something gets missed when you look at just the summary. Yes you get the gist of the plot, but that’s it. You miss the color of the character interactions, the side stories that have an ultimate impact on the climax.

In other words, you miss the context, and without that context, how do you know the summary or conclusion is correct?

That last part becomes critical as the accuracy of generative AI sits at roughly 90% by academic estimates assuming the answers are in the initial training data (and it drops considerably if not). As generative AI cannot tell where the edge of what is known and unknown sits, it will generate a seemingly truthful response that can be dangerously wrong.

This is where Tech Diligence will take us: teasing out the AI slop that gets generated and to pull out what the underlying context really is. All to ensure the complex systems that make up our businesses continue to work as designed and every time. That they are understood well enough so when we do need to make changes to it, we can do it confidently, quickly, and cheaply.

cab

– P.S. I am putting together a webinar looking into my approach on assessing the tech stack for the initial acquisition planning sessions. If you want to know more and sign up, then check out https://www.atelier-solutions.com/webinar.