Diligence · Operating decision guide

What AI evidence can a buyer inspect at exit?

Otomat editorial · Revised 5 November 2026

Give the buyer a traceable record of what runs, what it costs, who can operate it and what rights transfer. A demo and a forecast do not establish a transferable asset.

Separate the product from the story

A seller may call a workflow proprietary even though it relies on a vendor account, a departing employee and customer data with restricted use. Inventory the application, prompts, evaluation cases, connectors and deployment configuration separately from third-party models. Identify the owner of each item and ask the appropriate legal and commercial reviewers what can actually transfer.

Let the buyer repeat a bounded test

Prepare a permitted demonstration set with ordinary cases, exceptions and denied requests. Include the accepted version, expected output, scoring instructions and known failures. The buyer should be able to see how a result was judged rather than rely on the seller’s chosen highlights. Redact or substitute confidential material before granting access; a diligence request does not authorize unrestricted copying.

An AI evidence room index
Check	Evidence to bring	Decision or stop condition
Ownership and rights	Component register and qualified review of transfer restrictions	Disclose any unresolved license, account or source-data dependency.
Reproducible operation	Versioned test set, expected results and known failures	Separate repeatable evidence from a curated sales demo.
Continuity	Backup-operator exercise and transition support scope	Price or resolve the dependence on a departing person.
Economics	Volume, cost history, accepted benefit and reconciliation	Keep forecasts outside the record of realized benefit.

Prove operation without the founder

Ask a backup operator to start the workflow, diagnose a failed case, restore the last accepted version and identify the support route. Record what required help. A working system with incomplete operating documentation may still be useful, but the buyer should see the dependency and transition cost. Do not describe a supervised rehearsal as independent operation.

Keep the financial record separate

Provide the baseline, observation window, workload, incremental costs and finance-reviewed benefit record alongside the technical evidence. Label scenarios and unreconciled claims. Buyers may value resilience, documentation or speed differently; the presence of AI does not establish an exit premium. The evidence room should make a buyer’s assessment possible without prescribing the valuation conclusion.

Questions before the decision

Does AI justify a higher exit multiple?

Not by itself. A buyer must assess the business effect, durability, rights, dependencies and risk. This evidence index does not predict a valuation premium.

Should the seller expose live client data?

Only through an authorized process. Use permitted, redacted or synthetic cases when access rights do not support exposing production records.

Take the evidence sheet to the meeting

Download the blank CSV, assign an owner to each check and record the evidence. Keep completed sheets in your own approved system.

Download the evidence sheet (CSV)

Use the working tools

Blank templates are ungated. Adapt them to the workflow; inputs are not submitted.

Open the operating charter

Sources and limits

These are Otomat’s proposed operating methods and original decision artifacts. External references inform risk management; they do not certify this method or establish client results. Linked sources were selected for this review; their live revision dates may change.

For anonymous documentation and proposal patterns, see delivery evidence and its boundaries.

Related decisions

Bring a workflow to the discussion

Share the business goal and constraints through the mandate process. Do not send sensitive production data in the initial brief.