You send the summary. The person who signs it reads your two pages, and then opens the contract anyway. They will not tell you they did that, because redoing the work is easier than raising it with you.
Whether these tools ever pay for themselves beyond a single desk is decided in that moment. Can one person trust another person's AI-assisted work enough to build on it without redoing it? Until the answer is yes, every gain is personal and nothing compounds. You have not saved anybody any time. You have moved the work downstream and made it invisible.
So what has to travel with the work? Less than people reach for, and not the part they reach for first. Provenance travels backwards; personal method does not travel forwards.
What a colleague needs is a small amount of context about the output: the sources that actually mattered, what the AI contributed, what you checked or changed or rejected, the assumptions it rests on, and anything still unresolved. On a supplier renewal note it looks like this. "Figures from the July invoices; competitor rates from quotes dated 12 and 14 June. AI drafted the comparison, I corrected the licensing count and rewrote the switching section. The renewal date is unconfirmed." Three sentences. Twenty seconds.
What should never become a requirement is your prompts, your transcript, your interaction sequence, your style. Method is tacit and does not transplant; it was fitted to your knowledge of the domain, not your colleague's. Mandating it moves the practitioner's responsibility from choosing an approach to complying with one, and the judgment you were trying to spread lived in the choosing.
There is a seven-hundred-year-old institution that got this design right. From 1300, under a statute of Edward I, English goldsmiths' work was assayed: the finished object was tested for the purity of its metal and struck with the leopard's head before it could leave the maker's hands. From 1363 a second mark was added, the maker's mark, identifying who was answerable for the piece. What the system never did, in seven centuries, is regulate the craft. No statute told a goldsmith how to raise a bowl or set a stone. Test the object. Name the maker. Leave the making alone.
Now the objection, which nearly cost me the recommendation. Provenance is the thing that gets forged.
In the 1990s John Drewe placed roughly two hundred forged paintings into the art market, and the significant fact is that the paintings were not good. His forger, John Myatt, sometimes worked in household emulsion. What Drewe forged was the provenance. He talked and donated his way into the archives of the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum, inserted doctored pages into genuine exhibition catalogues, and manufactured certificates in the names of dead collectors, so that when a dealer checked the archive, and checking the archive was the diligence, the archive confirmed the fake. Once provenance confers trust, forging the provenance is cheaper than forging the work.
A three-sentence note is the cheapest thing in this entire arrangement to falsify, and it gets written under exactly the throughput pressure that makes falsifying it attractive.
The defence is in the part of the hallmark I had been underweighting. A note that merely asserts is forgeable at almost no cost. A note that names a person who can be asked, who corrected the licensing count, who talked to the engineer about the integrations, is expensive to fake, because the fake sits one question away from discovery and the person named knows that while they are writing it. So, fully stated: the note travels with the work, it makes claims that can be tested against sources, and it is signed by someone who expects to be asked. Provenance is a claim by a person, not a property of a document.
The comparison has a limit that has to be said out loud. Silver purity can be assayed and professional judgment cannot, so no note makes a conclusion testable that was not testable before. Test what can be tested, make the professional contribution visible, and name who stands behind the rest.
I cannot show you that this changes what happens downstream. Nobody has instrumented it, my own practice included, and by the standard I am arguing for that gap matters. What I can report is the pattern it was built from: where the note is missing, capable people quietly rebuild the work they were sent, and I have watched that happen often enough to design around it.
One last thing, and it decides whether any of this survives contact with an organisation. The note is a courtesy to a named colleague, not a record for an inspector. The day anybody starts collecting them, it has become a control, and it will be written accordingly.
Something to try this week. Attach three sentences to the next piece of AI-assisted work you hand to somebody: the sources that mattered, what you changed or rejected, and what is still unresolved. Then watch what the recipient does with it. You are looking for one thing, whether they build on your work or go back to the source anyway.
The uncomfortable version. Ask the colleague who receives your work most often when they last redid a piece of it rather than building on it. Do not ask whether they trust your work, because they will say yes. Ask when they last opened the original anyway. They will have an answer, and it may well be about something you sent last week.