EVIDENCE PIPELINE STARTER KIT (2026)

Use this to stop “AI paste” from becoming operational reality. The goal: every AI-influenced decision that matters has an owner, sources, checks, and a place to live.

PART 1 — DECISION LOG TEMPLATE (copy/paste)

Decision:
Owner:
Date:
Expires (required):

Context (2–5 lines):

Decision statement (one sentence):

Evidence (links required):
- Source 1:
- Source 2:
- Source 3 (optional):

Assumptions (explicit):
- A1:
- A2:

Risks + mitigations:
- Risk:
 Mitigation:

Rollout plan:
- Scope (who/what is affected):
- Gate to proceed (what must be true):
- Revert plan (how to undo safely):

Notes on AI involvement (required if used):
- Tool/model used:
- Prompt summary:
- What was accepted vs edited by a human:

PART 2 — “MANDATORY EVIDENCE” CHECKLIST

Require citations for anything that:
- Changes customer-facing commitments (pricing, policy, SLAs)
- Touches security posture (auth, secrets, infra permissions)
- Impacts hiring/performance decisions
- Claims facts about users, revenue, incidents, or compliance

Minimum acceptable evidence types:
- Dashboard link or query output
- Ticket/issue IDs (Zendesk/Jira/Linear) with dates
- Contract clause / policy document link
- Incident postmortem or log excerpt
- User interview note with date and participant role

Unacceptable “evidence”:
- “The model said…”
- Unlinked screenshots with no context
- Unsourced market claims

PART 3 — GATES (choose one per workflow)

Support drafts:
- Human edit required before send
- QA sampling checklist attached to weekly review

Code generation:
- Tests required for merge
- Security scan required (SAST/dependency scan)

Product/strategy writing:
- Claims require links
- Assumptions must be listed

PART 4 — WEEKLY OPERATING RHYTHM (30 MIN)

Agenda:
1) Review 3 decision log entries that expired or are expiring soon.
2) For each: keep / modify / reverse.
3) Identify one missing evidence pattern and fix the template or gate.

If you run this for a month, AI stops being “content.” It becomes a faster path from evidence to accountable decisions.