How to check an AI-written procedure before staff use it

The draft will read well. That's the danger. A tool's maker warns that a confident tone isn't proof, since wrong answers can be delivered with high confidence.¹ A smooth step can still be wrong.

Step by step

• Read it with the job in front of you. Stand where the work happens. Compare every line with what you do, in order.
• Mark each step: right, wrong or guessed. If you can't say which, it's guessed. Treat guessed as wrong until proved.
• Look for invented detail. Tools can produce fabricated references to documents that don't exist.¹ Check any form name, law, code or standard the page mentions. Does it exist, and does it say that?
• Check names and settings. Buttons, menu paths, product names, room names. These change, and the tool can't see yours.
• Look for what's missing. A checklist exists so that no step is left out of a procedure.² Ask the person who does the job every day: "What do you do that isn't on here?"
• Look for what shouldn't be there. A checklist should include only necessary checks.² Cut anything padded in to look thorough.
• Check the order. Swapped steps change the job. Closing the till before counting the cash is a different job from counting first.
• Check warnings. If the job has a hazard, the page should say so. Safety content needs an official source, not just your read. See safety and legal steps.

Compare with an outside source

Where a step rests on a maker's manual, a regulator or your own insurer's rules, open that source and read the matching part. The tool's maker says to verify technical information and references to external documents.¹ Don't rely on the same tool to confirm its own work.

The UK's National Cyber Security Centre notes that such answers can sound convincing yet be only partly correct.³ Partly correct is the hardest kind to spot, because most of the page looks fine.

Test it on a newcomer

Hand the page to someone who's never done the job. Watch. Don't help.

• Where do they stop?
• What do they ask?
• What do they do differently from the page?
• Do they finish with the right result?

Every stall points at a missing or unclear step. Fix those, then run it again with someone else if you can.

Sign it off

• A named person approves the page. Not "the team".
• A date goes on it, with the next review date.
• A note records what was checked and against what, such as "checked against the supplier's manual".
• A way to report problems stays open. Staff who find a wrong step should know who to tell.

Procedures need improving as conditions or equipment change.⁴ Put a review in the diary now rather than when something breaks.

When to stop and ask an expert

• The step involves electrical work, gas, chemicals, heights or heavy lifting.
• The step involves the law, tax, privacy or employment.
• Two sources disagree.
• You can't find a source at all.

In those cases, the page waits until an official source or a qualified person has been through it.