The DDQ Agent
a worked example.
Most investment-firm executives have heard the phrase "AI agent", far fewer have seen what one actually does, end-to-end, inside a real workflow. This page walks through a Due Diligence Questionnaire (DDQ) agent the way we would design and deploy it.
A familiar problem inside a mid-market fund
A $1.2B mid-market PE manager. Lean IR team of two. Four active funds. Quarterly LP reporting plus a steady stream of inbound DDQs.
A pension allocator sends a 180-question DDQ covering investment process, ESG, cybersecurity, valuations, and operational due diligence.
Roughly 3 weeks of elapsed time. IR drafts, deal partners review, Compliance and IT chase down policies, GC signs off, and the answer library drifts further out of date.
Five stages, one auditable pipeline
This is the same shape we would design for an RFP agent, a deal screening agent, or a research synthesis agent. Only the corpus and the reviewers change.
Pull all your documents into one place
The agent reads everything you already have: past investor questionnaires, policies, fund performance, compliance manuals, IT and business continuity docs. It keeps track of where every fact came from and who is allowed to see what.
Before vs. after, the realistic picture
Numbers below are illustrative ranges based on the structure of the work, not a published benchmark from a specific client.
Manual DDQ workflow
- 2–3 weeks elapsed per major LP DDQ
- IR director and analyst absorbed for days
- Deal partners pulled out of investing time
- Answers drift; the same question gets two answers across funds
- Audit trail lives in email threads
Agent-assisted workflow
- First reviewable draft in under an hour
- Human reviewers spend time on judgment, not retrieval
- Every answer cited to a versioned source document
- House style and prior approved language enforced by default
- Each completed DDQ strengthens the firm's answer library
What we would not let an agent do
No autonomous send
The agent drafts and routes. A named human approves before anything leaves the firm.
No ungrounded answers
Every claim must trace to a source in the firm's corpus. If the corpus is silent, the agent flags rather than invents.
No cross-firm leakage
Private deployments, customer-managed keys, role-based access, and immutable audit logs aligned to SEC and FCA expectations.
The same pattern unlocks a dozen workflows
Once a firm has a clean, governed corpus and a review-first agent pattern, the next workflow is mostly configuration, not a new project from zero.
See what this would look like inside your firm
We would rather have a 30-minute conversation about your actual DDQ cycle than show you another generic deck. No data, no NDAs needed for the first call.