Write an AI statement of work with measurable acceptance

An AI statement of work should make disagreement cheap. A sponsor, engineer and reviewer must be able to tell what will be delivered, what evidence accepts it and which dependencies can stop the schedule.

Build the decision artifact

Begin with a measured current-state baseline and a business objective. Define users, one bounded workflow, in-scope artifacts and explicit exclusions. Express acceptance as observable outcomes across quality, safety, latency and operations. Name client and delivery responsibilities, assumptions, access dependencies, change control, handover and exit conditions. Commercial and legal review still belongs to the authorized parties.

The commercial leadership lab makes the artifact inspectable with authored inputs:

from leadership_cases import statement_of_work_case

result = statement_of_work_case()
assert result["complete"] is True
assert result["measurable"] is True
assert result["production_write"] is False
assert result["signed_contract"] is False

The synthetic SOW contains seven required sections and three numeric acceptance tests. Autonomous payment, production ERP writes and legal opinions are excluded. The object is complete as a teaching artifact, but no contract has been signed.

Protect the decision from weak evidence

Avoid words such as accurate, seamless and production-ready without a metric and test population. Do not hide source access or security approval inside assumptions. When acceptance depends on labelled data, specify who approves the set and how changes are versioned.

Keep these artifacts for review:

• baseline source and measurement window
• scope, exclusions and responsibility matrix
• acceptance tests with evidence owners
• dependency, change and exit record

This practice aligns with the discovery, productisation, client enablement, technical leadership and capstone sequence in the FDE for Professionals course. The course link describes the pathway; the local scenario is fictional and does not claim a client engagement, investment result, hiring decision or certificate.

Practice task

Draft a one-page SOW for a six-week pilot. Ask another person to identify exactly which result accepts, changes or stops it.

Continue learning

This article is part of the Commercial judgement and delivery leadership sequence. Use the neighbouring tasks when you need the prerequisite or the next application.

• Continue with Build a value tree that separates adoption from model quality.
• Then apply it in Estimate the cost of exceptions in an automation business case.

Reference: GOV.UK Service Manual: Discovery.