the Deal Is Already Wrong: How AI Rewriting Due Diligence, QoE Work, and Economics of Every LBO You Touch

The QoE firm charging $400K for a 6-week engagement is now competing with a 2-person AI stack that delivers the same structural work in 10 days. This book covers what changed, how it happened, and what every deal practitioner needs to build now to still be in the room in 2030. AI just removed the floor. Every deal model built before 2024 needs to be rebuilt. In 2019, a quality of earnings engagement at a middle-market PE firm took six weeks and a pyramid of associates. The floor underneath that fee structure, the labor cost of financial analysis, has been removed. The firms that do not recognize this are already losing work to the ones that do. What this book covers across 15 chapters and 5 parts: - The QoE model that is cracking: what AI does to the EBITDA bridge, how it finds dirty EBITDA that manual review misses, and what the associate role becomes when the machine does the first draft - Buy-side diligence reimagined: data room analysis, LBO model inputs, and the competitive intelligence layer that sophisticated PE funds are already running before the management presentation - Sell-side engineering in the AI era: how to prepare a data room when you know the buyer's AI has already read it, and what management presentations need to survive AI fact-checking - Industry-by-industry breakdown: software, healthcare services, industrials, business services, consumer, financial services - AI diligence exposure is not uniform and the practitioners who know the difference win every room - The new deal table: what advisory firms need to build to survive, what lenders can see that they could not before, and what the deal table looks like in 2030 Written for QoE practitioners, PE associates, M&A advisors, and CFOs preparing companies for sale. Includes the AI Diligence Toolkit, a Sector Exposure Reference Card, and the Pre-Sale CFO Checklist. Part of the StackedCFO Series. Each book is a standalone read.