Why beforehand, and why on one page
An AI workflow almost always touches systems with different owners: the user's email, sales' CRM, IT's documents. Until someone writes down the whole picture, everyone answers for their own part and nobody can approve the whole. That is why projects get stuck in review — not because the answer is bad, but because it is not written anywhere.
The eight questions
1. What data enters the workflow?
Name it concretely for each step: message text and attachments, a contact's name and role, amounts, a transcript. "Client data" is not an answer. Also note what you deliberately exclude — that is the sentence that shortens a review fastest.
2. Does it include special categories of personal data?
Health, sickness absence, origin, memberships, criminal-offense data. If the answer is yes, that is not a detail but a redesign: that data usually belongs outside the workflow, or the workflow needs a separate, narrower setup.
3. Which systems are read, and with what permissions?
For each system: which part, on whose behalf, and read-only or write access too. The distinction between "reads the employee's mailbox" and "reads one shared mailbox" determines the entire discussion.
4. What is written, and can it be reversed?
Every write action, with its target system, control level (read-only, human approval, or automatic with a log) and whether the previous value is retained. A write action without a way back should not be automatic.
5. Where does processing take place?
For each component: where the workflow runs, where the model is hosted, where the logs reside. For many organizations, processing in the EU is a firm requirement, and that requirement applies to the chain, not one link.
6. What is retained, and for how long?
Distinguish three things often lumped together: input (the message, the document), intermediate results (extracted fields, transcriptions) and the log of what the workflow did. They deserve different retention periods, and usually the middle category should be kept for the shortest time.
7. Who can access it?
Who sees proposals, who sees logs, who can change the workflow. And: what does the supplier see? That last question deserves a concrete answer, not a reference to a policy document.
8. What happens on departure?
Where the workflow, credentials and logs reside when the collaboration ends, and what is deleted. Beforehand this is a paragraph; afterward it is a negotiation.
What this page does not fill in for you
The answers depend on the systems and suppliers you choose. Request them and write them down literally; an answer you cannot explain back is not an answer.
The gain
These eight questions take a morning and move the conversation with IT and management to the beginning, when changes are still cheap. They also regularly lead to a simpler design: if the answer to question 1 gets too long, the workflow sees too much — and seeing less often also means working better.