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BEFORE YOU APPROVE AI OUTPUT
AI drafts arrive faster than the review process was built for. Work this before you approve copy, a deck or anything a customer will read: brief, claims, voice, commercial sense, and a named person who will defend it.
How it works
- Say what you are reviewing and how it was produced.
- Flag anything that raises the stakes: customer claims, regulated language, a competitor comparison.
- Work the checklist and mark each line.
- Record your decision, then copy the sign-off into the thread where the draft lives.
Your sign-off checklist will appear here.
Paste the record where the draft lives. If you chose send back or escalate, the unmet lines are the brief for the next pass, so send those rather than a note asking for it to be tightened.
A management aid, not legal, medical or compliance advice. Where your sector requires a formal review, this checklist sits before that review and does not replace it. Nothing you enter is sent anywhere or stored.
Goes well with
Your team is already using AI.
Get the policyIf you would rather have this done with you than to you, this is the work I do. See services
Fluent is not the same as true
The failure mode of a good model is not gibberish. It is confident, well-structured prose with an invented statistic in the third paragraph and a citation that does not resolve. Nothing about the writing signals which sentence to check, which is why the check has to be a step rather than a feeling. The three lines that block approval, brief, claims and named accountability, are the three that turn into somebody else problem later.
This is a gate, not a policy
It applies to one deliverable at the moment of approval. What staff may put into which tools, who approves new tools and what happens when something goes wrong belongs in an AI use policy. Both matter, and a policy nobody applies at approval time is a document rather than a control.
COMMON QUESTIONS
Is this an AI usage policy?
No. A policy sets the rules for the organisation. This is the gate for one deliverable at the moment somebody signs it off.
Do I have to run every line every time?
Mark not applicable where it truly does not apply. Do not skip claims or accountability, which is why approve stays blocked while either is unmet.
Does it replace legal or compliance review?
No. Where claims, comparisons or regulated language are involved, mark the line as needing a specialist and stop.
What if the draft came from an agency rather than a model?
Use it anyway. The questions are about the work, not the author, and agency drafts increasingly involve a model somewhere in the chain.