Manufacturing AI pilots don't die on the plant floor. They die in three conference rooms: security review, legal review, and compliance review. The usual cause is that nobody walked in with answers. This checklist is the walkthrough of all three rooms: the questions that will be asked, and the answer that should satisfy the person asking. If a vendor can't clear this list, the pilot was never going to ship.
Security review: what your CISO and IT will ask
The security room cares about one thing: the boundary. Where does data go, who can touch it, and what happens when something goes wrong.
- Where does inference run?
What good looks like: Inside your VPC or on-premise tenancy. No multi-tenant processing of your data on shared vendor infrastructure, and the vendor can show you the architecture diagram, not describe it.
- What leaves our network boundary?
What good looks like: Nothing by default. Anything that must cross the boundary is enumerated in writing, encrypted in transit, contractually excluded from training, and logged on both sides.
- How is access scoped?
What good looks like: Least-privilege service accounts tied to your identity provider (SSO). Per-workflow scopes that expire when the task does. No standing admin credentials, no shared logins.
- How is it separated from OT and the plant floor?
What good looks like: Network segmentation between AI workloads and OT systems, read-only taps where possible, and no direct write path to anything that moves metal.
- What is logged, and can we replay it?
What good looks like: An immutable audit log of every read and action with the reasoning behind it, exportable to your SIEM. When something looks off, you replay it instead of reconstructing it from fragments.
- What is the incident story?
What good looks like: A kill switch you control, rollback for consequential actions, and notification commitments in the contract, not in a slide.
12 more questions across legal and compliance review. Open the full checklist here, then print or save it as a PDF for the people who run those rooms. Work email only.