Validation Is the Real Work

Deming said it best: "In God we trust, all others must bring data."

In the age of AI, I'd update it: in God we trust, everything else we validate and ground.

At work, I watch people hand AI parts of their job without grounding it. When AI doesn't know, it doesn't error out. It fudges the data and packages it so well you won't notice, until it hits a downstream impact: regulatory, financial, or brand.

Same pattern in personal lives. People are turning to LLMs for advice on health, relationships, and money. When it's what we want to hear versus what's right for us, we pick comfort. LLMs are built to give you comfort.

The lesson is the same everywhere: adoption is easy, validation is the real work.

In a CoE, nothing ships without three checks:

1. Is it grounded to an approved source?
2. Does it pass our golden eval set?
3. Would a second model, as judge, flag it for hallucination or risk?

We are building a small, anonymized library of grounding failures: cases where AI sounded completely confident and was completely wrong. If you lead a CoE or have shipped AI in a regulated environment and have a failure you're willing to share, get in touch.