3.3 · Red Lines — When AI Must Not Be Used

The Proposals Nobody Said No To

10 minCourse 03

These are three real AI proposals — each one presented to a real organisation with a business case, a budget, and senior sponsorship. Each one should have been declined. None of them were.

Proposal A: The Sentiment Scoring System

Proposal B: The Candidate Screener

Proposal C: The Productivity Monitor

The Pattern

In each case, the business case was real. The technology worked as designed. The failure was in governance: no structured evaluation of legal risk, no escalation to legal or ethics review, no human in the approval chain who was empowered to say no. The frameworks in this course are designed to prevent exactly this.