The data room dies at close. The decision has to outlive it.

What data room AI actually does

Data room AI improves findability across folders, runs Q&A on files, and produces summaries during diligence. For a single deal in flight, that is useful. The team finds the term sheet faster. The associate gets a first-pass read on the credit agreement without spending Saturday on it.

But the value is bounded by the deal cycle. The moment IC approves and the deal closes, the data room is archived. The AI summaries become unreferenced text on a shared drive. The IC memo summary lives in PowerPoint. The model lives in Excel. The LP question two years out has no structured answer.

The trust gap inside data room AI

• →LLM summaries cannot carry provenance — they generate language, not lineage
• →“Cite the source” produces a page reference, not an extraction trail back to a specific cell or table
• →Definitions drift between summaries — “EBITDA” in one summary is not the same EBITDA in the next
• →Override audit is missing — when the analyst tweaks a number, the summary does not record the basis
• →Decision basis is not locked at IC — the AI does not know when an approval happened

For diligence acceleration, this is acceptable. For an IC record that has to defend the decision two years later, it is not.

What the decision integrity layer adds

• →Source-backed extraction — every figure clicks back to the source cell, page, or table
• →Lane-aware KPI normalization — same definition across every deal in the same lane
• →Risk Signals graded against firm policy — observed value, firm threshold, verdict
• →IC anchor on approval — the decision basis at commit is locked to a tamper-evident record
• →Drift tracking after the room votes — every operator update tested against the anchor
• →Provenance-signed exports — every docx and xlsx carries a fingerprint the LP can verify

What survives the close

When the LP asks why this asset was approved at the price it was approved at, the answer is not an LLM-generated summary that can no longer be regenerated against the original sources. The answer is the IC anchor: a tamper-evident record of every figure, every assumption, every scenario in force at the moment the committee voted. Capital Refinery produces that. Data room AI does not.