Keep the Receipts

Every grant I worked with had a record retention schedule: what to keep, how long to keep it, and when it was safe to destroy. Receipts, approvals, reports — each with its own clock. It felt like filing-cabinet thinking until the day someone asked for a three-year-old document and we produced it in ten minutes.

AI is generating records most teams haven't thought about: prompts, outputs, model versions, override logs. And almost nobody has decided how long any of it lives.

That's a problem in both directions. Keep everything forever and you're hoarding liability — and possibly violating privacy rules. Delete too soon and you can't reconstruct what happened when it matters.

So make the schedule now, while it's calm. How long do you keep prompts? Model outputs? Logs of human overrides? Write it down, get agreement, and follow it.

"Keep the receipts" was grants wisdom. For AI, add the second half: and know when to shred them.

I explain frameworks; I don't give legal counsel.