Decision rights: the box that decides whether your AI project survives
Most AI projects don't break on the model. They break the first time an agent does something reasonable that nobody was willing to put their name against.
Governance is usually treated as something you assess about an organisation — once, at the top. But an agent doesn't consult the org chart. It acts, per request, thousands of times, in places no committee is watching. So the boundary has to exist as a property of the running system, decided per decision, before the build.
That's what cell AI3 (Decision rights) on the Business Solution Canvas forces: which decisions may the agent make alone, which need a human signature, and what happens to the request in between.
The uncomfortable test of whether AI3 is really filled: is the boundary in the code, or only in the prompt? A prompt is a request to a model. Code is a rule it cannot talk its way past. Those are not the same guarantee, and the difference only shows up on the day it matters.
Three examples from our own products, all deliberately deterministic:
- Health (Y Võ Việt Nam): the rule that AI never diagnoses or prescribes moved out of the prompt into a code gate that inspects the model's output and replaces it if it drifts, then routes the person to a licensed practitioner.
- Marketing (Serviceplace): an agent may draft a campaign piece — and the system writes the quality gates back to fail every time. It cannot grade its own work. A paid campaign can only reach
pending_approval; no code path lets an agent spend money. - Escrow (bixsourcing): releasing funds above a threshold needs two different human approvals, and the whole subsystem ships switched off until the legal review closes.
None of that makes the AI weaker. It makes it deployable.
Try it this week: take one agent you already run, list every decision it touches, and mark each one agent alone or human approves — money, law, health and anything irreversible always in the second column. Then check where each line is actually written. If it's in a prompt, it's a preference. Move it into a gate and it becomes a boundary.
The Business Solution Canvas is free and openly licensed (CC BY-SA) — one page, no sign-up.
--- Reference — canonical BIXSO documentation: https://bixso.ai/research/decision-rights-the-box-that-decides-if-your-ai-survives