Build for the Memo, Not the Demo — Notes from 200 Investment Committees

Official Schedule Context

By the end of this talk you will have a buyer-side specification for AI investment agents, the exact

artifacts, evidence formats, and trust gates a senior finance team will require before letting an AI

system touch a $100M+ capital allocation decision. Drawn from fifteen years and roughly 200

investment committees at CK Hutchison (A.S. Watson Group) and China Resources Holdings, on the side

of the table the AI engineering audience almost never hears from. Most enterprise AI in finance is

still being built by engineers who have never sat in an investment committee. I have spent fifteen

years on the other side of that demo, cross-border M&A, IPO execution and strategic investment, as a

buyer on deals including Oatly (Series B through Nasdaq IPO), Airbnb (Series F), SenseTime, Moore

Threads, Leapmotor and EVE Energy, and on the A.S. Watson tri-market IPO and Temasek's strategic

stake. I have watched analyst memos get torn apart, and signed off on decisions where being wrong

meant being wrong by nine figures. From that seat, almost every AI finance demo I have seen has the

same problem: it optimizes for the demo, not for the memo. This talk walks through the specific

failure modes that kill AI agents at the IC door: Source hierarchy is not retrieval. A footnote in

an audited 10-K outweighs a sell-side note, which outweighs a transcript, which outweighs an

internal email. Most RAG systems flatten this. Numerical consistency is non-negotiable. A memo that

says "revenue grew 18%" in paragraph one and "17.4%" in the sensitivity table is dead on arrival.

Contradiction is a feature. Real diligence surfaces conflicts between sources; AI agents tend to

silently resolve them. Every assumption must be separable from every fact. Investment committees do

not approve assumptions hidden inside prose. Audit trail is the deliverable. If a regulator, an

auditor, or a board member cannot trace a claim back to evidence in under thirty seconds, the system

is unusable. Accountability cannot be delegated to a model. Someone has to sign the memo. The

architecture has to reflect that. The session closes with a concrete buyer-side specification, what

an AI investment agent must produce, in what form, with what evidence, before a senior finance team

will let it touch a live deal. Not a framework slide.

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