The short answer: check an AI draft for five things, in this order — anything you didn't supply, every number, every name and reference, every promise, and the tone. For most business documents that takes about five minutes, and it's the five minutes that makes the rest of the time saving safe to keep.
Most people check an AI draft the way they'd proofread their own writing: they read it top to bottom and see whether it sounds right. It almost always does. That's the trap. The tools are built to produce text that sounds right, and a draft that sounds right is the one nobody looks at closely.
Why the good-looking draft is the risky one
When you give a tool your notes and ask for a finished email, quote or report, it fills every gap in what you supplied with whatever is most plausible. A clause number that looks like the right clause. A delivery timeframe that sounds like the kind you'd offer. A product specification close to the real one. A sentence about your warranty that reads like a warranty.
None of it is random, and that's what makes it hard to spot. The errors cluster in exactly the places you gave it least — which are also the places you're least likely to reread, because you didn't write them and they read smoothly.
So the useful question isn't "is this good?" It's "which parts of this did I not give it?"
The five-minute check
- Anything you didn't supply. Go through the draft and mark every fact that wasn't in your notes or your source document. Each one is either confirmed against a source or deleted. This single step catches most of what goes wrong.
- Every number. Prices, quantities, dates, times, measurements, percentages and GST. Recalculate any total yourself rather than trusting arithmetic done inside a paragraph of prose.
- Names and references. The client's name spelled the way they spell it, the right site address, the right job number. If the draft cites a standard, a clause, a section of an Act or a policy, open it and confirm it exists and says what the draft says it says.
- Promises. Anything that commits the business: timeframes, inclusions, guarantees, "we'll also", "at no extra cost". Drafts are reliably generous on your behalf, because generous is what a helpful reply sounds like.
- Tone, read as the recipient. Read the first and last paragraph as the person receiving it. Does it answer what they asked, in the first two lines, in a voice someone at your business would actually use?
The check, on one card
- Every fact you didn't supply is confirmed or gone
- Every number recalculated, including GST and totals
- Names, addresses and any cited clause or section checked at the source
- No promise the business hasn't decided to make
- The first two lines answer the question the reader actually asked
Who checks, and what never skips it
The working rule we teach is short: drafted by whoever has the facts, checked by whoever carries the responsibility. For most internal notes and first drafts those are the same person, and your own read against the card above is enough.
Some documents should always have a named second person, whoever drafted them:
- Anything with a price or a contractual commitment in it
- Anything going to a regulator, an insurer, an auditor or a court
- Anything about a person's health, money, housing or legal position
- Anything that admits or denies fault
Write that list down. It belongs on the same page as your never list, and if you don't have that page yet, a one-page AI policy is the place to start. The module that walks a team through it is writing your team's AI policy.
If you'd like the check built into how your team drafts, rather than left to memory, that's part of every team workshop.
See the team workshopMake the draft easier to check in the first place
Most of the checking burden is set before the draft is written. Four habits shrink it considerably.
Give it the source rather than asking it to remember. Paste the quote, the job notes or the policy you're referring to. A tool working from your document invents far less than one working from its general knowledge. For long material, ask it to quote the passage it relied on for each claim — the approach in working with long documents.
Tell it what to do when it doesn't know. One line does it: never invent a figure, date or reference — write [CHECK] where you don't have it. The gaps then announce themselves instead of hiding in smooth prose.
Ask for its assumptions. After the draft, ask: list every assumption you made that wasn't in my notes. It won't catch everything, but it shortens step one.
Save the instructions. If those lines live in a reusable setup, nobody has to remember to type them. The prompt builder includes a "what must never appear" question for exactly this reason, and getting output you can actually use covers the input side in full.
When the check takes longer than the writing
Occasionally the check takes longer than writing the thing yourself would have. That's not a failure of checking; it's information about the job. Either the input was too thin, or the job involves judgement the tool can't supply — a tax position, a clinical decision, a safety sign-off. Those stay with the qualified person, and the right move is to stop using the tool for that job rather than check harder. Which tool for which job includes the jobs where the answer is neither, and picking the one job to fix first is about choosing work where the check stays short.
For the job customers see most often, answering customer emails with AI applies the same check to replies and complaints.