Researching current market information
Current claims require traceable sources and observation dates. Expected disposition: Proceed with controls.
Task boundary
Researching current market information is assessed as a specific task and workflow, not as a general endorsement of AI for the surrounding job. Current claims require traceable sources and observation dates.
Assumptions
- The brief concerns facts that can change and therefore has an explicit “current as of” date.
- Researchers can define an approved set of primary and reputable secondary sources.
- A reviewer can open cited passages and distinguish evidence from analyst inference.
Decision
- Disposition: Proceed with controls
- Pattern: Retrieval-grounded workflow
- Inherent risk: medium
Rules that drive the decision
- A freshness requirement rules out reliance on model memory.
- Traceable claims favor retrieval-grounded generation; no external action is needed.
Why alternatives were rejected
- A direct prompt cannot establish freshness.
- An agent is unnecessary for a research brief.
Controls
- Record publisher, URL, publication date, and observation date for every material claim.
- Label estimates, conflicting evidence, and uncovered questions rather than smoothing them into certainty.
Acceptance threshold
These are example starting thresholds for a bounded pilot of this workflow, not universal benchmarks. For researching current market information, the accountable owner should make them stricter when the task, consequence, or policy requires it.
- Every material factual claim links to a passage that directly supports it and meets the stated freshness window.
- A deliberately stale and a weak-authority source are rejected in the evaluation set.
Reassess when
- The brief begins making personalized financial recommendations or other high-impact decisions.
- The workflow gains permission to contact vendors, trade, purchase, or publish.