A buyer's adviser sends you a list of diligence questions on Thursday afternoon. By Friday lunchtime a bright new hire, with no finance qualification and a good AI assistant, has drafted an answer to every one of them. The answers read well. Question 37 asks whether the board approved the change to your revenue recognition policy, and the draft says it did, in March.
Who checks that before it goes to the buyer, and whose name is on it when it does?
The company in this scene is illustrative. No client's data appears in it.
What Y Combinator is asking for
Y Combinator's Requests for Startups for Winter 2027 includes one called The $15-an-Hour Expert. Its author, Brad Flora, wants to fund "AI that turns an ordinary worker into an expert". He describes companies hiring capable people without credentials and backing them with AI to do work that used to need specialists. His examples include mergers and acquisitions, global trade, tax, benefits and insurance claims. Where a credential is the bottleneck, he writes, the model works.
Some of that will reach your company. Plenty of expert work is pattern, procedure and reading, and a good assistant helps a capable person do more of it. If it means a founder can get a diligence pack drafted for a fraction of today's cost, founders will take it.
The request has nothing to say about who answers for the work once it is done. For a board, that is the first question.
Two cases where the credential was already there
In 2025 Deloitte Australia agreed to repay the final instalment of a contract worth about A$440,000, after a University of Sydney researcher found citations to works that did not exist in a report it wrote for the Australian government. The revised report disclosed that a generative AI model had been used. Deloitte said the corrections did not affect the report's findings.
The same year, the High Court in London dealt with two cases, Ayinde and Al-Haroun, in which lawyers had put case citations before the court that were false or could not be found. The court held that checking them was the lawyer's own professional duty, and referred those involved to their regulators.
Neither case involved a $15-an-hour worker. The work came from a large consultancy and from regulated lawyers, and the false sources still got through. A credential tells you who is allowed to sign. It does nothing to the draft.
So taking the credential out of the drafting leaves the same gap and the same person answerable. In the UK, section 174 of the Companies Act 2006 expects a director to use reasonable care, skill and diligence, and that doesn't change with what the first draft cost or who wrote it.
What changes when the draft gets cheap
Drafts multiply and the number of people who can sign does not. In a sixty-person company, a diligence answer, a board paper and a variance note all end up with the same two or three people: a founder, a part-time CFO and a chair who sees the numbers six times a year.
A fluent draft also makes checking harder, since nothing on the page looks wrong. The March approval in question 37 reads the same whether it happened or not. The reviewer needs to see where the claim came from and to open it, which only works if the board's decision was recorded somewhere at the time.
Cheap expert work therefore raises the value of your record. Without one, your reviewer is left re-doing the work or trusting it.
What that looks like in Boardverse today
Boardverse is built for the signature rather than the draft. Your team can draft with the AI it already uses, and these rules apply to what comes back.
Ask Poseidon drafts each diligence answer from your confirmed Data Room papers and records, with citations. A Founder must approve it before it can be copied or exported, and that Founder cannot be the person who asked the question or last edited the answer. An answer with nothing in your papers or records behind it can't be approved. It is rejected or asked again.
An agent's submission to a governance record, such as a decision, a risk or a finance pack, waits as a proposal until a different named person confirms it. The person who prepared a financial pack cannot approve it. A resolution needs two different signatories, and if its text changes between the signatures, the first one is invalidated.
None of this proves an answer is right, because a person can confirm something wrong. It shows who answered for it and when, and whether it has changed since. Why the record matters more than the model makes the longer case.
Where to start this quarter
- List the AI-drafted work that leaves your company or reaches your board: diligence answers, investor updates, packs and minutes.
- Name one person who signs each kind, and make sure it isn't the person who drafted it.
- Refuse any claim without a source the signer can open. If the source doesn't exist, the claim goes back.
- Record who signed what and when, as you go, so the answer is ready when a buyer asks.
Question 37 is still on your desk on Friday afternoon. With a record, opening the March decision takes a minute, and you sign or you send the draft back.
Check out Boardverse, or start with the five-answer diagnostic.