Being able to explain a document six months later

Six months later, somebody asks

A figure in a report turns out to be wrong. A client asks why their letter said what it said. A colleague inherits your files. An auditor, a regulator or an opposing solicitor asks how a document was produced.

In every case the question is the same: where did this come from, and who checked it? If the answer lives only in a chat window that has since been deleted, or in the memory of somebody who has left, you have a document you cannot explain.

This is not about disclosure to the public — that is a separate question with its own lesson. This is internal record-keeping, and it is the part people skip because nothing goes wrong for the first few months.

Rerunning the prompt does not reproduce the output

Worth stating plainly, because it defeats the obvious shortcut.

Saving the prompt is not saving the answer. Models are updated, sometimes without a version change you can see; sampling varies run to run; system prompts and retrieval indexes change underneath you. The same instruction in six months produces something different, and you cannot tell which parts differ because the model changed and which because it was always variable.

So the record has to contain the output, not a recipe for regenerating it.

The three things to keep

For any generated artefact that matters:

1. The inputs — the source documents, the data extract, the version of each. Not "the customer file", but the actual file as it was.
2. The instruction — the prompt or the brief, verbatim.
3. The human — who reviewed it, when, and what they changed.

Point three is the one that is genuinely load-bearing. "Reviewed by A. Okafor, 14 March, corrected two figures against the ledger" is a defensible position. "AI-assisted" is not; it names a tool and assigns no responsibility.

Where to put it: the document's properties or a footer for a light version, and a project folder for anything substantial — the sources, the brief and the final output, together, with a date.

Use the version history you already have

Every modern office suite keeps version history and most people ignore it, then email report_v3_final_JS_edits.docx around instead.

Working in one file with history intact gives you, for free, the record of what changed and when. It survives you leaving. It is admissible in the ordinary sense that it is a business record rather than a reconstruction.

Two habits make it worth much more: save a named version at each real milestone ("first draft, AI-assisted, unchecked" and "checked against ledger") and use comments rather than a separate email thread for review discussion, so that the reasoning sits beside the text it concerns.

The uncomfortable other half

Records cut both ways, and it would be dishonest to present retention as purely protective.

Chat logs, prompts and generated drafts can be disclosable. In litigation, in a regulatory investigation, in some jurisdictions under freedom of information or right to information regimes, material your organisation holds may have to be produced — including a draft that says something the final version does not, and including the prompt in which somebody asked how to phrase an awkward point.

That is a real tension. Keep everything and you build a disclosure surface. Keep nothing and you cannot explain your own work. There is no neutral position, and organisations that pretend there is have simply chosen one by accident.

What is unsettled, and should be presented as unsettled: how AI prompts and outputs are treated for retention, privilege and disclosure is being worked out differently across jurisdictions and sectors, and guidance is thin and changing. This is not something to resolve from a course. It is something to raise with whoever owns records management where you work, and to decide deliberately, in writing, with a stated retention period.

The minimum that is better than nothing

If your organisation has no policy and you have no appetite to start one, do this much:

• In the document properties or footer of anything substantial: "Drafted with AI assistance from [named sources]. Checked by [name], [date]."
• Keep the source files and the final output together in one folder with the date in its name.
• Do not delete the chat until the work is finished and accepted.

Three habits, none taking more than a minute. Their value shows up exactly once, at the worst possible moment, and then repays every minute you spent.