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§ 03 — How Recovery Works

The asset file may never have existed.

What exactly did the company buy? A license? Access to a changing model? A semantic layer over uncontrolled corporate data? A continuously updated service whose behavior was never frozen? A productivity capability residing partly in employees who have since left? An interaction history whose evidentiary chain has expired?

In banking resolution, the note, collateral, payment record, borrower, lien, and servicing history could eventually be located — even when the file was messy. With enterprise AI, the asset file may never have existed.

Reconstruction is therefore closer to digital archaeology inside a moving system than to conventional accounting.

§ 03.a

The three-layer model

  1. ILayer I

    AI Investment Forensic Analytics

    Tests whether AI investment claims reconcile with financial, operational, technical, and governance evidence.

  2. IILayer II

    AI Asset and Expenditure Reconstruction

    Creates a standardized record of AI assets, contracts, costs, models, workflows, outcomes, dependencies, and decision ownership.

  3. IIILayer III

    AI Capital Recovery

    Supports decisions to retain, remediate, replace, restructure, impair, terminate, sell, or repurpose AI investments.

INVESTIGATE  →  RECONSTRUCT  →  RECOVER

§ 03.c

Sample case file

The reconstruction changes the story before it changes the numbers. Below, the same initiative shown as the client believed it, and as reconstruction produced it.

CASE FILE · PROJECT ATLAS

Enterprise AI Customer Service Initiative

ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE ONLY · NOT BASED ON AN ACTUAL ENGAGEMENT
Before reconstruction — what the client believed
Approved budget
$8.4M
Recorded expenditure
$8.4M (as budgeted)
Implementation vendors
1 primary
Model providers
1
Business units affected
2
Claimed annual savings
$5.1M
Unrecorded review labor
Not tracked
Shutdown dependencies
Not assessed
Initial classification
Retain
After reconstruction — what the record produced
Approved budget
$8.4M
Recorded expenditure
$11.7M
Implementation vendors
4
Model providers
3
Business units affected
6
Verified annual savings
$1.3M
Unrecorded review labor
$2.2M
Shutdown dependencies
High
Revised classification
Restructure
Potential recoverable capital
$3.4M
§ 03 — Reconstruction principle
The reconstruction changes the story before it changes the numbers.

A reconstructed record is the precondition for any defensible disposition.

Continue to § 04
Recovery Outcomes