AI TRAINING
AI for SME Exit Readiness and Due Diligence
Prepare your AI assets, governance records, and data room for a credible, buyer-ready transaction.
What it covers
This workshop equips SME owners and their advisors to document AI use cases, clarify intellectual property ownership, and build a governance-ready risk register before entering a sale or investment process. Participants learn how to structure AI-related disclosures in a data room, identify red flags that buyers and investors typically raise, and produce plain-language governance artefacts that increase buyer confidence. The format combines short facilitated sessions with hands-on document drafting, so owners leave with usable outputs rather than slides.
What you'll be able to do
- Produce a structured inventory of all AI tools and use cases used in the business, suitable for inclusion in a data room
- Identify and document IP ownership for AI-generated outputs and any proprietary training data
- Draft a one-page AI risk register that addresses the due diligence questions most commonly raised by acquirers and investors
- Organise AI-related disclosures within a data room using a standard folder structure and summary memo
- Recognise GDPR-related data-processing risks that could delay or derail a transaction and outline remediation steps
Topics covered
- Mapping and documenting current AI tools and use cases
- IP ownership: who owns model outputs, training data, and fine-tuned models
- Building a buyer-facing AI risk register
- Data room structure for AI disclosures
- GDPR and data-processing obligations relevant to a transaction
- Identifying governance gaps that reduce valuation
- Producing plain-language AI governance artefacts
- Red flags investors and acquirers commonly cite about SME AI use
Delivery
Delivered as a one-day in-person or virtual workshop (6–8 hours core, optional 2-hour follow-up session). Participants receive fillable templates for the AI asset inventory, risk register, and data-room disclosure memo. The session is approximately 40% facilitated instruction and 60% guided document drafting using the participants' own business context. A small cohort (2–10 people) is strongly recommended to allow personalised feedback. Remote delivery requires participants to share screen access to their existing tool stack for the mapping exercise.
What makes it work
- Completing the AI asset inventory before the workshop so facilitated time is spent on analysis and drafting, not discovery
- Involving the company's legal or M&A advisor in the workshop or in a post-session review to align governance artefacts with transaction documentation
- Using the risk register as a living document updated at each transaction milestone rather than a one-off exercise
- Getting explicit written confirmation of IP and data terms from key AI vendors before the data room opens
Common mistakes
- Treating AI tools as invisible infrastructure and omitting them from the data room entirely, which surfaces as a red flag during buyer discovery
- Assuming that because an AI tool is a third-party SaaS subscription, IP and data-processing liability automatically sit with the vendor
- Waiting until the transaction process has started to document AI governance, leaving no time to remediate gaps
- Conflating 'we use AI' marketing language with the structured evidence buyers and investors actually require
When NOT to take this
This workshop is not the right fit when a company has no active AI tool usage whatsoever — in that case, a general AI literacy programme should come first, and exit-readiness planning should be revisited once at least a handful of tools are in regular use.
Providers to consider
Sources
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