DiligenceSquared replaces consultants with voice AI agents in M&A deals

In the world of mergers and acquisitions, there is a stage that traditionally costs investors hundreds of thousands of dollars and takes weeks, sometimes months. This is due diligence—a comprehensive assessment of a company before purchase. Startup DiligenceSquared has decided it's time to change the rules of the game and proposed replacing an army of consultants with voice AI agents capable of independently conducting interviews with clients of target companies.

To understand the scale of the problem, it's worth examining how the process works today. When a private equity fund eyes a company for acquisition, it hires a team from McKinsey, Bain, or BCG to conduct what's called commercial due diligence. A key part of this work is dozens, sometimes hundreds of interviews with clients, suppliers, and partners of the target company. Consultants assess how sustainable the business is, how satisfied clients are, and what hidden risks exist. For a single such project, a consulting firm can bill anywhere from $200,000 to $1.5 million. Meanwhile, a fund reviewing dozens of potential deals per year is forced to conduct due diligence on each one—and most deals ultimately don't happen.

DiligenceSquared attacks precisely this pain point. Instead of live consultants, the company deploys voice AI agents that call the target company's clients and conduct structured interviews. The agents ask questions about product quality, service level, competitive positioning, and plans for continued cooperation—exactly what a consultant with an MBA degree and an hourly rate of a thousand dollars would normally ask. The collected data is automatically structured, analyzed, and transformed into a report on which the fund's investment committee bases its decision.

Technically, this involves a combination of several technologies: modern large language models ensure natural dialogue, speech recognition and synthesis systems make the conversation indistinguishable from talking with a real person, and an analytical layer extracts quantitative and qualitative insights from unstructured answers. It's critically important that agents can adapt to how the conversation unfolds—asking clarifying questions, responding to unexpected answers, and gracefully ending the conversation if the person is unwilling to engage.

Skeptics will rightfully ask about quality. Can an AI agent pick up on the nuances that an experienced consultant feels—pauses, intonations, unsaid things? Probably not yet. But DiligenceSquared doesn't claim to completely replace human expertise. The startup aims at a different segment: preliminary screening, when a fund needs to quickly and cheaply assess dozens of potential deals before spending serious money on deep analysis of two or three finalists. This is funnel logic—AI works at the top level, filtering out unpromising options, and people get involved where the stakes are highest.

For the management consulting industry, this is a troubling signal, though not a fatal one. The due diligence market for PE funds is valued in the billions, and major consulting firms are already actively implementing their own AI tools. However, DiligenceSquared demonstrates the classic disruption pattern: a new player offers a product that's lower quality but radically cheaper and faster, and starts capturing the bottom segment of the market. Over time, the technology improves and moves up the value chain.

There's also an ethical dimension. When a company's client talks to an AI agent, should they know they're not talking to a human? Requirements differ across jurisdictions, and as such technologies spread, regulators will undoubtedly pay attention. Additionally, data collected during such interviews may contain commercially sensitive information, and questions about its storage and protection become critical.

DiligenceSquared is not just another AI startup trying to automate routine work. It's an attempt to reimagine one of the most conservative processes in finance. If voice agents can truly conduct quality interviews for a fraction of the cost, it will open access to professional due diligence for mid-sized and smaller funds that simply couldn't afford it before. This, in turn, could change the dynamics of the entire M&A market, making it more competitive and transparent.