Most AI projects don't hold.
The problem
AI is offered as an answer before it has met a question. Companies buy in because the market demands it, because the board put it on the agenda, or because a competitor announced it. Rarely because a specific problem was stated, measured, and judged solvable this way.
Seen from the inside for three years, across three companies with nothing in common: three sectors, three sizes, three levels of maturity. Everywhere, the same questions, the same fears, the same mistakes.
This method does not describe what ought to be done. It describes what was done. No step entered it without a field case to support it.
The method
An arch does not hold because the last stone is beautiful. It holds because each voussoir presses on the one before it, and because a central stone locks the whole.
The Arch is the method. arkhen is the practice that publishes it, documents it and puts it to work. One is read; the other keeps it current.
The seven voussoirs
What you give the system, before discussing the system itself.
The work as done, not as described
The pain before the tool
What the data is actually worth
What you construct, where you are allowed to place it, and what the human keeps in hand.
Context before model
Where the error is paid for
Human decision where it commits
The central stone, alone in its movement. Without it, nothing that came before holds.
The keystone
Reopen the baseline measurement and conclude. This is not an eighth stone: it is the moment the temporary frame comes away and you find out whether the structure stands.
Nothing is proven until the centring is removed.
The tools
Each support can be used without assistance.
How they work, how to use them and where they stop being reliable are in the Arch guide, which comes with the diagnostic.
The sources
The method was tested against what already exists, always at the original documents and never at second-hand accounts.
Published methodologies
Existing diagnostic tools
Case law
What each one supports, and where the method departs from it, is set out in the guide.
The master builder
behind the Arch
AI practitioner in business.
Three years on AI projects across three unrelated sectors: industrial distribution, healthcare, energy. In turn product owner, AI coordinator and consultant.
This method is what I took from it. This site is the verifiable trace.
Run the diagnostic on where you actually are, not where you ought to be. The report goes out by email, and the Arch guide with it if you ask for it: the method voussoir by voussoir, how to use it and where it stops.