Decision rights
| Decision | Accountable authority |
|---|---|
| Pilot scope and public claims | Programme sponsor/product owner |
| Agricultural diagnosis policy | Chief agronomist or designated committee |
| Product, dose and legal restrictions | Regulatory authority |
| Knowledge publication/withdrawal | Knowledge approval board |
| Model/prompt/workflow promotion | Technical and safety approval group |
| Privacy, consent and retention | Data-protection authority |
| Security risk acceptance | Authorized security owner |
| Pilot expansion or suspension | Programme steering committee |
Governance forums
- weekly delivery and risk review;
- agricultural knowledge and policy board;
- model/evaluation review;
- privacy and security review;
- field-operations review;
- pilot go/no-go committee.
Each forum has written terms, quorum, evidence requirements and decision records.
Procure by capability
Avoid making one vendor the permanent owner of the complete platform. Separate procurement or contractual line items for:
- realtime media;
- speech recognition and synthesis;
- frontier reasoning and vision;
- internet search/research;
- environmental data;
- local GPU infrastructure;
- object storage and databases;
- security monitoring;
- implementation and operations support.
Internal interfaces, data schemas and source artifacts remain government-controlled.
Contract requirements
Cover:
- processing location and subprocessors;
- retention and provider training use;
- encryption and customer keys where available;
- model/version change and deprecation notice;
- quotas, availability and support;
- incident and breach notification;
- audit and security evidence;
- export of logs, data and configurations;
- deletion and termination assistance;
- portability and transition;
- licence rights for models and derived artifacts;
- pricing changes and cost transparency.
Research governance
Live external research is informative, not automatically approved knowledge. Store source provenance, retrieval time and applicability. Promotion into the permanent corpus requires agricultural review, metadata, effective dates and publication approval.
Architecture decision records
Record context, options, decision, rationale, consequences, triggers for reconsideration and approvers. Important ADRs include pilot topology, model gateway, research access, policy scope, deployment class, data retention and scaling changes.
Sovereignty path
Procurement should preserve a path from controlled hybrid operation to greater sovereignty. That requires exportable documents, schemas, prompts, rules, evaluations, audit records and provider-neutral APIs—not merely a contractual statement.