The High Stakes Reasoning Gate
Five questions to apply before approving high-stakes AI deployments.
What is a high-stakes decision?
A high-stakes decision is one with material financial consequences or customer relationship implications that the organization cannot easily reverse. The cost of being wrong is not a wasted budget line. It is lost revenue, lost customers, regulatory exposure, clinical harm, legal liability, or reputational damage that the original business case did not price in.
Pricing and underwriting decisions are high-stakes. Customer service decisions that create contractual or legal exposure are high-stakes. Clinical diagnosis, capital allocation under uncertainty, regulatory adjudication, claims handling, hiring at scale, field engineering recommendations, defense and intelligence triage, and automotive diagnostic procedures all qualify.
Internal drafting and summarization is not a high-stakes decision. Routine search and retrieval is not. The Gate is the wrong tool for those.
If the decision your AI deployment is making would produce a board agenda item when it goes wrong, the deployment is high-stakes. Apply the Gate below.
Designed for board distribution and vendor evaluation.
How to use it
For boards and executive owners
Apply before approving any proposed AI deployment in a high-stakes decision class. Require honest written answers to each of the five questions. Failure on any one question indicates structural risk that should block production approval until remediated.
For compliance officers and risk leaders
Use the Gate as a vendor evaluation tool. Ask the vendor to answer each question against their proposed deployment. Compare answers across vendors to identify which architectures actually produce accountable reasoning.
For engineering and product leaders
Use the Gate as a self-check before requesting production approval. The Gate exposes the architectural gaps that boards will discover anyway.
Want help interpreting Gate results?
Want help interpreting Gate results across an AI portfolio? Schedule a thirty-minute consultation with Bradley W. Petersen. Or apply the broader High Stakes Review for a written diagnostic on an entire AI initiative.