Inex One CEO argues AI widens the deal funnel rather than replacing CDD consultants

Inex One founder Max Friberg, an ex-McKinsey consultant who now runs an expert network marketplace, published a piece on 4 June 2026 arguing that AI tools will reshape commercial due diligence work for private equity rather than eliminate it. The trigger was a conversation with a consulting partner whose phase 2 CDD mandate was cancelled after the PE client ran 30 expert calls in-house and synthesised the findings with Claude against the IM and data room.

The piece is notable because Friberg sits on the supply side of that disintermediation. Inex One brokers expert calls; if megafunds shift CDD work in-house, the expert-call layer is one of the few parts of the workflow that travels with them.

Friberg's seven-task breakdown of a typical commercial due diligence engagement covers data analysis, sourcing, expert calls, independent perspective, commercial risk flagging, banker communications, the IC rubber stamp, and storytelling. He grades the first and the banker-comms work as low-friction targets for LLM substitution. "Claude shreds through the data room faster and more diligently than your associate Clark does," he writes, with the caveat that the output still needs human verification.

The harder-to-automate tasks cluster around judgment and access. Sourcing the right data, finding the right experts, seeing patterns across a mosaic of sources, and knowing when conviction is warranted , Friberg frames these as the differentiators between strong and mediocre investors or advisers. He treats LLM use for independent perspective as a writing-assistant problem: draft first, then use the model for feedback, never the reverse.

The rubber-stamp argument is the most institutional point in the piece. Friberg notes that PE has become institutionalised and that LP rulebooks require boxes to be ticked, which keeps a third-party sign-off in the workflow even at funds that could form the view internally. He calls this "the least exciting thing for a strategy consultant to be," but pairs it with brand and independent perspective as the moat.

On PE behaviour, Friberg's view is that tech tooling widens the top of the funnel rather than shortens it. More deals screened, deeper drilling on the ones that progress. The economic argument is straightforward: the payoff from making a good investment dwarfs the roughly USD 500k a fund pays a consulting firm, so the marginal cost of an external CDD is small relative to deal economics.

His closing prescription for CDD-focused teams: accumulate proprietary project data, sanitise and share past materials internally, and build tech capabilities. The piece is cut off mid-list in the source, but the framing is clear: the firms that survive will be the ones whose own data and tooling let their consultants run faster than the in-house PE team that just hired three Claude power users.

What to watch: whether the larger PE platforms publish or disclose in-house deal-screening tooling at LP days through 2026, and whether the institutional LP base signals any flexibility on third-party CDD requirements for the largest funds. Both would tell you how much of Friberg's rubber-stamp moat survives the cycle.