How is sensitive data protected?

All documents are encrypted with AES-256-GCM at rest and TLS 1.2+ in transit. A GDPR anonymization layer removes PII before any AI processing. Hosted on Vercel + Supabase (both SOC 2 Type II); Decision Intel’s own product-level audit is targeted for Q4 2026.

How long does integration take?

Less than 30 minutes. Upload documents directly, connect via OAuth for Slack, or use our REST API for bulk processing.

How does outcome tracking work?

Outcomes are detected automatically from follow-up documents, Slack messages, and web intelligence. You confirm with one click. Each reported outcome makes your future analyses more accurate.

How is Decision Intel different from ChatGPT or a general AI assistant?

ChatGPT gives one opinion from one model: ungoverned, untraceable, unaudited. Decision Intel is the reasoning audit platform. Most tools audit your data; we audit your reasoning — and catch the fatal blind spots in strategic memos before the committee does. It measures the noise in your reasoning the same way Kahneman did in the insurance underwriter study, simulates an AI boardroom of CEO, CFO, and board personas, runs what-if interventions against a 143-case public reference library, and compounds every confirmed outcome back into a calibrated Decision Quality Index your audit committee can defend. Not a chatbot; a reasoning audit, checkable from memo to outcome.

All workflows

For Heads of Corp Dev and M&A advisors

M&A bias audit

For Heads of Corp Dev and M&A advisors

Audit an acquisition thesis for the three named M&A failure patterns: Synergy Mirage, Conglomerate Fallacy, Winner's Curse.

Situation

You're recommending an acquisition. The deal team has spent months on diligence. The thesis is set.

Complication

70-90% of acquisitions miss their synergy targets per McKinsey + KPMG. The patterns that drive the failures are visible in the original memo — but only if you know what to look for.

Question

Which of the three named M&A failure patterns does this thesis fire on, and what is the procurement-grade response to each?

Answer

Decision Intel runs the M&A overlays — Synergy Mirage with BCG-mandate filter, Conglomerate Fallacy with parenting-advantage test, Winner's Curse with auction-dynamics detection. Compound-pattern severity bands on the DPR cover.

How it works

Upload the document

Paste the memo or drop the PDF / DOCX / spreadsheet. The 12-node R²F pipeline runs in ~60 seconds.

Review the audit

Decision Quality Index score, 22-bias R²F detection, named compound failure patterns, and verbatim evidence quotes for every finding.

Read the hardening questions

Each finding ships with an audit-committee-ready hardening question — the specific question a procurement reader would ask if they saw this memo cold.

Strengthen the reasoning

Rewrite the flagged passages with the inline co-edit panel. Get a passage-level DQI delta before re-running the full audit.

Run the cross-document conflict scan

Acquisition theses ship with attached documents (CIM, synergy model, integration plan, QofE). The cross-reference layer fires conflict detection across them — surfaces synergy claims in the memo that the model does not defend, or integration assumptions that contradict the deal rationale.

Why this matters

M&A failure is rarely a surprise on the day. It is a slow-motion failure visible in the original memo to anyone outside the deal team. The audit is the outside-view layer that the inside-view deal team cannot supply for itself.

Related from the case library

AOL Time Warner

AOL-Time Warner Merger

WeWork

WeWork Failed IPO and Valuation Collapse

Microsoft

Microsoft-Nokia Mobile Division Acquisition

FAQ

What if the acquisition is a tech tuck-in, not a platform merger?

The audit re-weights based on validity class. Programmatic mid-market tech tuck-ins are a high-validity decision class per Kahneman & Klein 2009 — the audit accordingly weights historical alignment higher and flags less aggressively on narrative coherence. Platform mergers are low-validity; the audit weights compound-pattern detection higher.

How does it handle deals with PE / equity-warrant structures?

The structural assumptions audit detects warrant terms, milestone triggers, and earn-out structures from the memo + term sheet. Conflict scan flags inconsistency between the deal-team memo and the term sheet — common failure mode where the memo promises one alignment shape and the term sheet locks in another.

Can I run this on a deal that has already closed?

Yes — the retroactive audit mode (shipped 2026-05-23) lets you backfill historical deals where the outcome is already known. Run the audit on closed deals to populate per-org Brier calibration and Decision DNA; the platform learns your specific failure modes from real outcomes, not synthetic forecasts.

Does the audit detect non-English memos?

The pipeline runs on the English text the parser extracts. For non-English source documents, translate first; the structural detection layers (named compound patterns, BCG-mandate filter on synergy claims) work on semantic patterns, not idiom-bound phrasing.

Audit an acquisition thesis

Other workflows

Strategic memo audit

Audit a strategic memo for cognitive bias and forecast errors in 60 seconds — before the board sees it.

IC memo pre-vote stress test

Stress-test an investment committee memo before the vote — catch Synergy Mirage, Winner's Curse, and Conglomerate Fallacy.

Board deck pre-presentation audit

Audit a board deck before the presentation — predict the toughest questions the room will ask.

Fund investment thesis audit

Audit a fund investment thesis before the LP raise — catch Narrative Coherence, Reference-Class Blindness, and Optimism Trap.

Decision pre-mortem

Run a structured pre-mortem before the decision is final — surface failure modes the room cannot see from the inside.

Run the audit on a real memo.

Paste a strategic memo and see the audit run end-to-end — free, no card.

Audit an acquisition thesis

Audit an acquisition thesis for the three named M&A failure patterns: Synergy Mirage, Conglomerate Fallacy, Winner's Curse.

Situation

You're recommending an acquisition. The deal team has spent months on diligence. The thesis is set.

Complication

70-90% of acquisitions miss their synergy targets per McKinsey + KPMG. The patterns that drive the failures are visible in the original memo — but only if you know what to look for.

Question

Which of the three named M&A failure patterns does this thesis fire on, and what is the procurement-grade response to each?

Answer

How it works

Upload the document

Paste the memo or drop the PDF / DOCX / spreadsheet. The 12-node R²F pipeline runs in ~60 seconds.

Review the audit

Decision Quality Index score, 22-bias R²F detection, named compound failure patterns, and verbatim evidence quotes for every finding.

Read the hardening questions

Each finding ships with an audit-committee-ready hardening question — the specific question a procurement reader would ask if they saw this memo cold.

Strengthen the reasoning

Rewrite the flagged passages with the inline co-edit panel. Get a passage-level DQI delta before re-running the full audit.

Run the cross-document conflict scan

Why this matters

FAQ

What if the acquisition is a tech tuck-in, not a platform merger?

How does it handle deals with PE / equity-warrant structures?

Can I run this on a deal that has already closed?

Does the audit detect non-English memos?

M&A bias audit

Audit an acquisition thesis for the three named M&A failure patterns: Synergy Mirage, Conglomerate Fallacy, Winner&apos;s Curse.

How it works

Related from the case library

FAQ

Other workflows

Run the audit on a real memo.

M&A bias audit

Audit an acquisition thesis for the three named M&A failure patterns: Synergy Mirage, Conglomerate Fallacy, Winner&apos;s Curse.

How it works

Related from the case library

FAQ

Other workflows

Run the audit on a real memo.

Audit an acquisition thesis for the three named M&A failure patterns: Synergy Mirage, Conglomerate Fallacy, Winner's Curse.

Audit an acquisition thesis for the three named M&A failure patterns: Synergy Mirage, Conglomerate Fallacy, Winner's Curse.