AI Responsibility Map

An AI responsibility map connects each consequential activity to the people who perform it, own its outcome, provide required advice and need to know what happened. Its value appears at handoffs: when a supplier changes a feature, a data feed becomes unreliable, a reviewer rejects an output or an incident requires the system to stop.

A conventional RACI matrix can help, but only if its rows describe work precisely enough to assign. RACI means Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed. A row called “AI governance” is too broad; a row called “verify the approved source version before publishing a discontinuation notice” can expose a real ownership gap.

This guide helps Saudi business owners, governance leads and delivery teams build the responsibility layer of AI governance setup. It uses an original product-discontinuation example to show how a map becomes an operating agreement rather than a spreadsheet of job titles.

Map decisions and handoffs before assigning letters

Begin with the lifecycle of a specific use: propose, source, configure, evaluate, approve, operate, change, respond and retire. Break the stages into actions whose outcomes matter. Include the moments when information or responsibility crosses a team boundary. These are often where a shared assumption replaces an explicit acceptance.

For each action, write the deliverable and receiving role. “Data team supports AI” is not assignable. “Data steward supplies a versioned supplier-status feed and reports missing fields to merchandising” identifies an output, recipient and failure path. The recipient should know what constitutes a usable handoff.

The NIST AI RMF Core calls for clear roles and communication around AI risk. The matrix below is an original implementation design. It should reflect actual organisational authority and capacity rather than assume one standard role structure fits every Saudi company.

Use accountability at a level where it can be exercised

For a defined decision or deliverable, select an accountable owner who can obtain resources, resolve conflicts and accept the outcome within their authority. A person who cannot influence the work is not made accountable by putting their title in a cell. Verify that the role holder understands the obligation and can act on it.

One accountable owner per clearly bounded row is a useful design rule, not a law of organisation design. Where several authorities genuinely apply, split the row into separate decisions with dependencies. For example, authorising the customer wording and authorising its publication can be different activities. Two unexplained A labels on “release” obscure that distinction.

Keep the approval-route record alongside the map. Responsibility for preparing an assessment does not confer authority to approve the use. Accountability for operations does not automatically include accepting every category of residual risk. The map should point to the relevant authority rather than invent it.

Define the four RACI roles in practical terms

The responsible role performs the work and produces evidence of completion. The accountable role owns the outcome and resolves whether it is acceptable. Consulted roles provide input that can affect the work before completion. Informed roles receive the relevant result so they can perform their own responsibilities.

Distinguish required consultation from optional advice. If legal review is a required prerequisite for a specific communication, an unanswered consultation cannot be silently treated as approval. If the consultation is optional, define who decides whether the additional opinion is necessary. Avoid using C as a way to list every department without explaining its contribution.

Likewise, specify what informed means. A release notice to a support team should state the operating boundary and escalation route, not simply announce that AI is live. If the team must acknowledge that it is ready to respond, that is an active responsibility and should not remain hidden under I.

Build a handoff contract for each fragile boundary

A handoff contract identifies the sending role, receiving role, artefact, acceptance criteria, timing and unresolved-condition route. It can be short. The key is that both sides agree when responsibility has actually transferred. Sending an email does not necessarily establish that the receiver accepted an incomplete or inaccessible file.

Fields for an AI responsibility handoff

Field	What to record
Work item	Specific decision or deliverable, linked to the use case
Sender and receiver	Roles and current authorised contacts
Acceptance evidence	Version, completeness and checks the receiver performs
Unresolved items	Known limitations, owners and effect on downstream work
Timing	When the handoff is needed and what delay changes
Fallback	Who acts if the receiver is unavailable or rejects the item

Prioritise boundaries that can propagate a wrong assumption: source ownership to model configuration, evaluation to approval, approval to release, and operations to incident response. A shared file repository makes artefacts accessible; it does not by itself define who accepts their meaning or sufficiency.

Worked example: product-discontinuation notices

Consider a fictional distributor using an assistant to draft bilingual notices about products being discontinued. Supplier feeds identify affected items, merchandising confirms commercial status, the assistant drafts text, a reviewer checks the message and an authorised employee publishes it. Customers may rely on the notice when planning replacement purchases.

The first draft responsibility map assigns “content” to marketing and “data” to IT. A rehearsal exposes a gap: a supplier feed marks an item unavailable temporarily, but the draft describes permanent discontinuation. IT can confirm that the feed arrived, while marketing cannot determine the supplier's status meaning. Neither assignment establishes who must verify the commercial fact.

The revised map gives merchandising accountability for the product-status determination, with the data steward responsible for feed lineage and completeness. The content reviewer checks whether the draft preserves that determination in both languages. The publishing owner confirms that the approved version is the one released. These are related but different responsibilities.

Illustrative responsibilities for a discontinuation-notice workflow

Activity	Responsible	Accountable	Required contribution
Supply traceable status feed	Data steward	Source service owner	Merchandising clarifies business meaning
Determine discontinuation status	Merchandising analyst	Merchandising lead	Supplier evidence and unresolved cases
Prepare and review bilingual draft	Content team and language reviewer	Communications owner	Approved status and wording requirements
Publish the approved notice	Publishing operator	Channel owner	Version and recipient checks
Correct an erroneous notice	Assigned response team	Incident or communications authority for the case	Source correction, affected audience and response approval

The example does not require every role to be a different employee. It requires the obligations to be distinct and workable. In a small team, the same employee might prepare and publish a notice, while another authorised reviewer verifies its material claims. If that separation cannot be staffed, the organisation must choose an appropriate narrower workflow or compensating arrangement explicitly.

Assign ownership of meaning as well as technical availability

Data pipelines can report success while business meaning remains unresolved. Assign someone who can explain the difference between temporarily unavailable, discontinued, superseded and recalled in the relevant source. The AI team should not invent the mapping because the model needs a clean label.

Document who approves changes to those definitions and how downstream users are notified. If a supplier changes a status code, the data steward may detect the format change, but the business owner determines its operational interpretation. Link the resulting change to evaluation and any notices already produced under the old mapping.

This is where AI governance and data governance connect. Data governance can establish source ownership and meaning; AI governance must also assign responsibility for how an output influences a communication or decision. Neither should assume the other owns the whole chain.

Make human review an owned workload

A map that says “business reviews outputs” is incomplete. Name the review role, its scope, evidence and available capacity. For bilingual notices, establish who checks facts, who checks Arabic and English meaning and who resolves a disagreement between language versions. A fluent sentence can still change a temporary status into a permanent one.

Define what reviewers may do when evidence is insufficient: request clarification, hold publication, correct a draft or escalate. Give them authority to use those options without relying on informal personal relationships. If performance targets reward immediate publication, examine whether they undermine the assigned review responsibility.

Record how unreviewed work is handled when volume exceeds capacity or the reviewer is absent. An automated system should not bypass the review simply because a queue is growing. Capacity is part of the operating design, and a fallback should preserve the approved communication boundary.

Keep supplier obligations visible without outsourcing accountability

A supplier may maintain a model, provide logs, notify changes or support incident investigation. Record those contractual and operational responsibilities with evidence of what the supplier actually provides. Do not assign the supplier an internal approval role it does not hold, or assume a service-level commitment covers business judgement.

For each supplier-dependent task, name an internal owner who obtains and evaluates the deliverable. If a change notice arrives in a commercial mailbox, someone must route it to the affected use-case owner. If a support request requires confidential evidence, someone must authorise and control that disclosure.

The supplier evidence requirements should match the map. An obligation to monitor a risk is difficult to perform if the organisation has no access to the necessary evidence and no agreed supplier route to obtain it. Identify that gap before declaring the role fully assigned.

Cover stop, correction and restart responsibilities

Assign who may pause the affected capability, who investigates, who communicates with affected people and who authorises restart. These roles may differ from the original project team. A responsibility map limited to launch leaves the most consequential operating moments unowned.

In the discontinuation example, stopping new notices does not correct messages already published. The response owner must identify affected versions and audiences, determine the correction with appropriate advice and coordinate publication. The source owner repairs the underlying status issue; the AI owner checks whether generated drafts need regeneration or withdrawal.

Link these responsibilities to the AI incident response plan. Preserve the distinction between emergency containment and final judgement about cause or legal notification. A person authorised to pause a workflow may not be authorised to make public statements or accept residual risk for restart.

Validate the map through a missing-owner exercise

Walk a real or synthetic case across the proposed roles. Ask each receiver to describe the evidence they need and what they do if it is missing. Observe whether the sender's notion of completion matches the receiver's acceptance criteria. Record disagreements as design defects, not personal failures.

Then remove one role temporarily, introduce an ambiguous source status and change a supplier feature. Test whether alternates and escalation routes work. An empty cell is obvious; a cell filled with a role that lacks time, access or authority is more dangerous because the document looks complete.

Ask a new operator to use the map without help from its authors. If they cannot identify the next accountable person, simplify the language or add a concrete handoff. The map should support work during absence and turnover, not depend on the relationships present during setup workshops.

Test workload and authority behind every assigned role

Ask each role holder to estimate the work implied by the map and identify competing obligations. A quality reviewer assigned to check every notice needs a realistic queue, access to source evidence and cover during absence. If the role is assigned without capacity, the map documents an aspiration rather than an operating control.

Separate responsibility for doing the task from responsibility for providing the necessary conditions. A reviewer may own checking a draft, while the communications owner provides staffing and the data owner supplies authoritative status evidence. The reviewer should not be blamed for an impossible task when those prerequisites have not been made available.

Define the escalation when capacity is exceeded. In the notice example, the approved response might hold publication, prioritise a defined subset or use a separately authorised manual process. It should not be an unrecorded practice of publishing drafts unchecked. The responsibility map can identify the person who decides among these options and the evidence they need.

Use a short acceptance conversation with each owner: what outcome are you accountable for, which decisions can you make, what evidence do you receive and what do you do when the preceding role fails? Record unresolved answers. A signature acknowledging the map is useful only if the underlying obligations are understood and feasible.

Fill one handoff record before rolling the matrix out

For the discontinuation workflow, complete a real or synthetic handoff from merchandising to content. The artefact should identify the product, status, effective date, source reference, uncertainty and approved communication boundary. The content team confirms that it can distinguish a temporary stock interruption from permanent discontinuation before generating a customer notice.

Illustrative merchandising-to-content handoff

Element	Example of usable content
Business determination	Supplier confirms temporary unavailability; permanent discontinuation is not established
Source evidence	Controlled supplier notice reference and reviewed version
Permitted communication	Describe the temporary status within the approved wording boundary
Unresolved question	Return date is not confirmed; do not invent one
Receiver acceptance	Content reviewer confirms the distinction is understood in both language drafts
Return route	Merchandising resolves a conflicting status before publication

This record helps distinguish several failures. If the source evidence was wrong, the source and business determination need correction. If the evidence was right but the draft changed its meaning, the content review failed. If the approved draft was correct but an earlier version was published, the publication handoff failed. The map should support that analysis without automatically assigning every issue to the AI team.

Preserve shared accountability for learning while keeping task ownership precise. An incident may involve several contributing failures; naming a responsible role does not prove sole causation or justify blame before investigation. The purpose is to establish who must provide evidence, repair the process and verify the outcome.

Use the completed handoff as training material with appropriate information protection. New role holders can see what acceptable work looks like and how an unresolved fact is carried forward. Update the example when the process changes, and retain the difference between an illustrative training record and evidence that a live notice actually passed the required checks.

Maintain the map as people and uses change

Store role definitions separately from named incumbents so ordinary personnel changes do not require rewriting the whole operating model. Keep current contacts, alternates and access permissions up to date. Preserve historical assignments where they explain previous decisions and actions.

Review the map when the use adds actions, audiences, sources or suppliers. A team that owned internal drafts may not own externally published advice. Connect the review to material change triggers and the inventory rather than relying entirely on an annual organisational-chart update.

Discuss an AI responsibility map with Open for AI using a workflow that crosses several teams. A useful setup deliverable combines the matrix with handoff criteria, actual role acceptance and a rehearsal showing that source meaning, review, publication and correction each have a capable owner.