Why this belongs before the build
An AI workflow is not a file you hand over. It is a set of components that can each have their own owner: the instruction, the connections to systems, the stored data, the log, and the environment it runs in. As long as everything works, nobody notices that these ownerships do not sit together. At the first change — a new employee, a different supplier, a system being replaced — it is noticed immediately.
Five questions
1. Who owns the instruction?
The text describing what the workflow must do, including the exceptions, is the intellectual result of the engagement. Record whether the client may keep it, change it and give it to someone else. This is a contractual question, not a technical one.
2. Who manages the connections?
A connection to a CRM, a document folder or a mailbox is authorized by someone. If that is the builder using their own account, access disappears the day that person leaves. Connections should be in the organization’s name, with an administrator who works internally.
3. Who has access, and who can revoke it?
Make a list of who can change the workflow, who can read the logs and who can grant or revoke access. That list should be shorter than people expect, and it should be reviewed periodically.
4. Where is the data, and for how long?
Which data is stored, where does the processing take place, and what happens to the history on termination. “Processing in the EU” is a starting point you can put in writing here; the retention period of your own logs is a choice you make yourself.
5. What does an exit look like in practice?
Not “can we get out” — the answer to that is always yes — but: what do you take with you, in what form, and what still works afterwards. The honest version usually reads: you get the instruction, the configuration and the logs; you set up the connections again with another supplier; and the workflow itself does not run without an environment that executes it.
The component people forget
The log. It is not the most exciting asset, but it is the only thing that explains afterwards why one step was allowed to run automatically and another was not. In an audit, a complaint or a handover it is the document you need — and it is also the component whose retention policy is most often written down nowhere.
How to record this without a legal project
One appendix to the order confirmation is enough: for each component the owner, the administrator and what happens to it on termination. Half an A4 page. The value is not in the wording but in the fact that the conversation took place before anything was running.