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. We email you the whole checklist too, so you can forward it to the people who run those rooms. Work email only, and no noise.