How to Capture AI Guiding Principles
Turn what your leaders believe about AI into principles people can act on
Every organization using AI is already working from a set of principles. In most, those principles are unwritten and vary from team to team.
One manager encourages her team to draft with AI while the manager down the hall bans it. A recruiter switches on the AI screening feature in your applicant tracking system because no one said not to. Each choice gets made alone, and staff are left guessing what leadership expects.
At JST People Strategy, we believe writing AI principles is a leadership decision, and it should start from the values your organization already holds. Your values say what you stand for. AI principles apply them to a new set of decisions.
That’s why we created the AI Guiding Principles How-To Guide, a six-step process for leadership teams to put their beliefs about AI in writing:
Start with your values: list them before anyone drafts a principle
Send a research pre-read: give leaders evidence and finished examples to react to
Write beliefs alone first: each leader checks in with their team, then writes before the group meets
Synthesize by situation: sort beliefs by the decisions staff will face, and treat disagreement as the decision to make
Show what each principle changes: pair every belief with a concrete example
Test and set a revisit date: share the draft with staff and put the next review on the calendar
Each step pairs one organization’s approach (Salesforce, Khan Academy, the University of Michigan, IBM, Microsoft, and the City of Boston) with how JST People Strategy wrote its own. The guide closes with a checklist of the nine principle areas that appear across eleven AI principles documents.
If a principle wouldn’t have changed a single recent decision, it needs rewriting.