Business AI · Topic 03
How Do You Prevent AI From Making Mistakes?
AI can produce incorrect information. A business system should therefore never rely on "the AI said so." Mistakes cannot be eliminated entirely, but they can be caught, limited, and routed to people.
Controls a business system can use
- Approved source material — the AI works from information the company has approved
- Retrieval from authoritative company information rather than general knowledge
- Fixed-rule validation — totals, formats, and required fields are checked by conventional code
- Independent checking — a separate step reviews the result
- Required evidence — answers must point to where the information came from
- Confidence and exception handling — uncertain items go to a person
- Human approval gates before consequential actions
- Permission limits on what the system can see and do
- Business rules the AI cannot override
- Audit logs of what happened and why
- Fail-safe behavior — when something is wrong, stop rather than guess
Match the control to the consequence
Drafting an internal summary may need relatively little control. Sending money, changing pricing, approving contracts, or making commitments to customers should require substantially stronger controls — often including a human approval.
An example from our own work
Spur Fleet is our centrally managed platform; each participating website has a Spur Machine. Its research, article, review and guarded publication components have been built and tested locally. These tests demonstrate engineering controls, not real-provider article quality or live autonomous publication. Human review, source attribution and explicit publication permission remain necessary.
Put Useful Business Knowledge to Work.
Learn how AI Search works—or have Western Software build and manage the system for your business. Our managed packages bring together website build, ongoing management and the knowledge services available in your agreed scope. Spur Fleet content operations remain planned; we explain availability before you choose a package.