Useful AI needs visible boundaries

An institutional assistant should have a clearly defined purpose. Helping staff locate an approved procedure is a different task from making a decision about a person or a financial transaction. The application’s scope should make that distinction visible to its users.

Access rules must apply to the underlying documents as well as to the answers. Source references help a reader inspect the original material, while an explicit uncertainty path gives the system a useful response when it cannot support an answer. Human review remains necessary for decisions assigned to responsible staff.

Evaluation should include ordinary questions, ambiguous requests, unavailable information, and attempts to retrieve restricted material. This sample publication outlines design considerations only. It does not claim a tested model, a deployed assistant, or compliance certification.