Most BD teams first used AI to summarise data rooms. That saves time, but a summary does not answer the real diligence question: is there enough evidence to make, price, structure or reject this deal?
In The AI for Pharma Business Development & Licensing Course, Dr Carlos Velez treats diligence as a structured decision process in five moves. Each move builds on the output of the one before.
Move 1. Start from your own BD thesis.
Before any opportunity arrives, turn what you are looking for into a deal-thesis tree: what must be true for a deal to make sense for you.
Move 2. Map every licensor claim to its evidence.
“The asset is Phase III-ready.” If the only support is a proposed trial design in the licensor’s deck, the claim is unsupported, and AI can flag that across an entire data room in minutes.
Move 3. Find what is missing.
Use AI to compare what should be in the data room at this stage with what is actually there.
Move 4. Triage by materiality.
Not every unknown is a red flag. Separate deal-breakers from issues that change valuation, structure or timing.
Move 5. Turn risks into actions.
Each material issue becomes a next diligence step or a deal term.
AI does the volume work in each move. The go or no-go decision, and the accountability for it, stay with the BD team.
What this means for licensors
Run the same five moves on your own data room before a partner does. A gap you have found and explained puts you in a far better position than one the licensee uncovers. Also check that an LLM can read your charts: increasingly, the first reader of your deck is a machine.
“Learning how to create the five moves, build loops, and use AI to check accuracy and references
provided valuable approaches that I can apply in my work.”
Viatris
Anwar Jagessar, Senior Medical Manager Business Development - Europe & Canada
The course covers how to set up each move with your LLM, including the prompts and the human decision points:
Continue your learning from Carlos
If you’d like to learn more from Carlos, CELforPharma also offers a 1-day, hands-on course where you'll learn how to:
- Use AI to support opportunity scouting and partner identification
- Apply AI during asset evaluation and due diligence preparation
- Structure information and analysis to support decision-making
- Explore how AI can assist negotiation preparation and deal planning
- Recognise where professional judgement remains essential when using AI in BD&L
The AI for Pharma Business Development & Licensing Course
With Dr Carlos Velez
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