01What happens.
Safety manuals and procedures exist as PDFs, some written by the company and some supplied by third parties. A PDF looks complete on screen whatever its structure or age, so people check it for content and not for how a machine reads it.
Where several versions sit online with no version handling, a machine selects by authority and serves the version it selects.
02Why it matters.
Handling and storage instructions carry the company's duty of care to the people who follow them. Managers responsible for the manuals updated them correctly. The version a machine now serves to a technician on a phone, or to an internal system answering a customer, is the one the machine found most authoritative. A document superseded years ago reads to a machine as readily as the current one.
A wrong temperature or a wrong sequence is a dangerous position, and it arrives in the company's name.
03The case.
The company is anonymised, we have use cases 41 and 42 describe the failures in greater detail.
The company's procedures and safety manuals had been created as PDF documents over many years. Some of those documents had been supplied by a third party. The documents sat deep in the company's systems, and one had fed both the intranet and a page far down an old part of the public website. They were not checked for how a machine would read them, because a PDF looks fine on screen.
The estate had grown with no version handling. Internal sites with limited access and limited testing had consolidated large volumes of safety information over time, and several versions of the same instruction existed with nothing to say which was current.
The first failure concerned the required storage temperature. The current temperatures were in a newer document that was weakly cited. The historic document carried the fuller surrounding material and the longer history of links, and the machine treated it as the proper one. Staff and customers asking for the storage temperature received the old range.
The second failure was the sequence of a procedure that said to follow steps 1 to 9. In the PDF, the reading order had never been set, so a machine read the steps in the order it recovered them, and the answer returned was 1, then 3, then 9, then 6, then 2. Mixing chemicals in that order is dangerous, and the page that produced it read correctly to a person.
Both failures were served by the company's own internal AI system and by the external tools staff and customers used, and the same documents later sank an internal AI project, use case 28 has more.
04Exposure.
The company's directors are accountable for safety instruction in circulation under the company's name, including the versions the company's own systems serve. For the United States finding, California Corporations Code S309 sets the standard of care for directors. It expects such care, including reasonable inquiry, as an ordinarily prudent person would use in like circumstances, with inquiry made when the circumstances indicate the need. The documents read correctly to a person, and whether that indicated a need for inquiry is a question on the facts; no breach is stated here.
The consequence sits first with anyone who handled or stored the chemicals on the wrong instruction. It continues through the company's product and public liability and its licence position. A regulator would ask how two versions of a safety instruction came to be in circulation, with the company's own system serving the older one.
05What AI Readiness changes.
The manuals were checked for content by people who knew the chemistry, and there was no check of what a machine would read. The missing view was the outside-in one: each safety-bearing document as AI reads it, the versions in circulation, and the version served for each question, including the copies on distributor and partner sites. We supply that outside-in view and provides the supporting evidence.
With it, the company establishes one current instruction for each product and market. It retires the versions it controls that contradict it, has partners correct the versions they hold, and publishes procedures in a form a machine reads in the order a person does.
06Related use cases.
The corrected storage instructions lost to the document they replaced
The first failure inside this case.
Directors exposure - from companies on record issues
The second failure inside this case.
The internal AI project failed, was written off, and the documents that sank it were never examined
What the same documents did to the company's AI investment.
07References.
- California Corporations Code section 309. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?sectionNum=309.&lawCode=CORPleginfo.legislature.ca.govWe do not enable external links - please copy and paste, you are then certain as to the link being opened
Next step
Talk it through, in your terms.
The briefing sets this case in your organisation’s terms, and the discussion follows your questions.
Observed, anonymised. No company is identified.