Machine assistance
Where we use AI, and where we do not.
Models help us read faster. They do not decide anything. Every finding that reaches a buyer has been read by a person, and no model output changes a supplier, a quotation or a commercial state on its own.
The boundary
Two lists, and nothing moves between them.
The distinction is not about capability. It is about which decisions are allowed to be made without a person's name attached to them.
What it does
- Extracts fields from a document — names, numbers, dates — into a structured form a reviewer then checks against the original.
- Drafts a first version of a request from a buyer's notes, which the buyer edits and submits themselves.
- Translates a phrase from a supplier document so a reviewer can read what it says.
- Summarises a long specification so a reviewer knows which pages matter.
What it never does
- Decide a check has passed or failed.
- Set, change or advance a supplier's status.
- Submit a request, choose a supplier, or make any commercial decision.
- Reach a buyer without a person having read it first.
How it is governed
Advisory, recorded, and reviewed by someone other than the requester.
- Schema-validated
- Output has to fit a defined structure before it is stored at all. Anything that does not fit is rejected rather than interpreted.
- Recorded with its prompt
- Every execution is logged with the prompt version and model metadata, so a finding can be traced back to what produced it.
- Independently reviewed
- The person who accepts an output is not the person who requested it. Self-review is refused by the system, not by convention.
- Never a business decision
- No task mutates a supplier, an RFQ, a quotation or any financial or contractual state. That boundary is enforced in the code, not in a policy document.
Why there is no chatbot here
A review is only worth reading because every line points at a document and a date. A conversational answer that cannot show its source fails the first test we apply to anything else on this site, so it does not belong on it.
The report is written by people.
Machines read the first pass. A person signs the finding, and the finding names the document it came from.