Matthew BertramAI & DECISIONS

For energy & industrial leaders

Five questions about the decisions you no longer make yourself.

AI systems are already inside decision chains at most operators — in procurement scoring, in maintenance triage, in who gets a callback. The question is not whether they are there. It is whether anyone owns what they decide.

Answer from memory. If you have to go look something up, that is itself an answer. Under a minute — no email required to see your result.

Question 1 — Visibility

Do you know where AI already sits in a decision your company makes?

Question 2 — Accountability

If one of those decisions went wrong, could you name who is accountable?

Question 3 — Traceability

Could you reconstruct how that decision was reached six months later?

Question 4 — Review

Has anyone outside IT reviewed what those systems decide?

Question 5 — Defensibility

Is any of this written down somewhere a regulator could read?

Nothing is sent anywhere. The result is calculated in your browser.

What this is, and what it is not

This is five questions, not an audit. It will not tell you whether a specific model is safe, whether you are compliant with any particular rule, or what a control framework should look like in your environment. Those are engagements, and they start with evidence rather than recollection.

What it does do is separate three states that get confused with each other: a company that has governance, a company that has people who remember things, and a company that has neither. Most operators are in the middle and believe they are in the first.

Matthew Bertram is a Certified AI Ethicist & Auditor (Oxethica) and the author of Digital Information Governance®, USPTO Reg. 8147558.