Building AI workflows humans can actually audit
Why explainability matters more in operational systems than demos.
A demo lets you show the output. An operational system has to defend it. When an LLM extracts a lien balance from a hospital PDF and writes it into a trust ledger, the next question is always: how do I know it’s right?
The answer can’t be "trust the model." It has to be a trail — the source page the model read, the model’s confidence on the field, the rule that said "if confidence is below this threshold, escalate to a human," and the human’s sign-off. Audit isn’t a feature you bolt on after the demo gets traction. It’s the substrate the demo runs on.
This shows up everywhere AI starts to touch operations: claims processing, KYC, contract review, agentic workflows. The systems that survive are the ones where the audit trail is the product, and the AI is one of the moves inside it.