Working specification

AI Workflow Evidence Protocol

A seven-stage record for moving from a real job and baseline to a measured follow-up outcome without hiding failures or human decisions.

Author controlled. Published by AI Amigos. Useful for provenance, but not independent recognition or adoption. Prior-art review in progress; no claim of major significance or independent adoption.

Job to be done

Create a comparable, auditable record of one AI-assisted workflow experiment.

Required inputs

  • Defined job and owner
  • Pre-AI baseline
  • Data sensitivity boundary
  • Fixed evaluation cases
  • Success and stop criteria

Procedure

  1. Define the job, owner, affected people, data boundary, baseline, and stop criteria before running an AI system.
  2. Freeze representative evaluation cases and record what a satisfactory result requires.
  3. Record each approach, model or tool version, prompt or configuration fingerprint, cost, latency, and human intervention.
  4. Score every approach against the same cases and retain failures, overrides, and rejected results.
  5. Choose whether to stop, revise, pilot, or deploy; name the accountable human decision owner.
  6. Measure the real outcome after use rather than substituting an offline score for impact.
  7. Create a sanitized proof pack that excludes raw inputs, confidential artifacts, and unsupported causal claims.

Outputs

  • Baseline record
  • Experiment comparison
  • Evaluation matrix
  • Human decision log
  • Follow-up outcome
  • Sanitized proof pack

Publication gate

A result remains private or draft until every applicable gate passes.

  • Method version is fixed
  • Baseline and calculation are visible
  • Negative results remain present
  • Privacy review passes
  • Claim scope matches the evidence
  • A human approves publication

Limitations

  • The protocol improves traceability; it does not prove causation.
  • Results remain setting-specific until independent replications exist.
  • High-stakes uses require qualified domain and legal review.

Sources and prior-art context

These sources inform the working synthesis. Their inclusion does not imply endorsement.

Change history

  • 2026-08-25 - Published the author-controlled working specification and explicit non-claims.