Somebody has told you to do something about AI.
Maybe not in those words. Maybe it was a slide, or a competitor’s press release, or a director who came back from something and was enthusiastic. Either way it has landed with you, and you are now the person who is supposed to have a view.
And here is the thing you have probably not said out loud in the meeting: you are not actually worried about whether it works.
You are worried about the Tuesday.
The Tuesday
It has been running for a few months. It is quick, it is cheap, everyone is pleased with it. And then it tells a customer something that is not true. Not maliciously and not obviously — a date, a price, a policy, a thing it says you offer that you stopped offering in March.
The customer believes it, because why wouldn’t they. They act on it. And then they ring.
Somebody answers that call. It will not be the supplier.
What is unusual is not the mistake
Everything goes wrong sometimes, and organisations are quite good at things going wrong.
What is unusual is that in most places I talk to, nobody has decided in advance who owns it.
The contract from the supplier says the output is not guaranteed — they almost all do, and it is not unreasonable of them. The team who bought it assume that means the supplier is carrying the risk. The supplier assumes the opposite. Nobody has written down what the system is allowed to state as a fact. And nobody is reading what it actually says to people, because there are thousands of conversations and no one has the afternoon.
So the answer to who owns it turns out to be: whoever picks up.
It is not a technology problem
It will not be solved by choosing a better model. It is an ordinary governance question wearing unfamiliar clothes, and the reason it feels hard is that it arrived through procurement rather than through risk.
The good news is that it is answerable. It takes a short document and somebody willing to read a week of transcripts.
When your AI says the wrong thing to a customer → — including the six questions to put to whoever sold you the system.