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Purpose & Intent

Every AI Product must declare its purpose and intended use.
Purpose defines why the product exists and what problems it aims to solve.
Intent defines the scope of usage it is designed, approved, and suitable for.

Why Purpose & Intent Matter​

  • Transparency → Consumers understand what the product is for, and what it is not for.
  • Governance → Explicit intent prevents misuse and misinterpretation.
  • Discoverability → Clear purpose helps match products to consumer needs in catalogs.
  • Trust → Intent declarations help regulators and auditors evaluate risks.

Purpose Declaration​

An AI Product must declare:

  • Problem Statement → The challenge it addresses.
  • Intended Outcomes → The value it delivers (e.g., classification, summarization, recommendation).
  • Target Domain → The context or sector (finance, healthcare, retail, education, etc.).
  • Business Value → Economic, operational, or user benefit.

Intent Declaration​

An AI Product must define intended usage boundaries:

  • Supported Use Cases → Tasks or workflows for which the product is validated.
  • Consumer Scope → Intended consumers (individuals, teams, organizations, agents).
  • Constraints → Operating assumptions (e.g., requires structured text input, limited to English).
  • Exclusions → Explicit clarifications of what the product does not cover.

Alignment with Governance​

  • Purpose & intent must align with Prohibited Uses.
  • Products with high-risk purposes (e.g., medical diagnosis, financial scoring) must declare risk category (see Governance & Policy).
  • Catalog entries must include both purpose and intent fields for trustworthy discovery.

Example​

AI Product: Fraud Detection Classifier

  • Problem Statement: Detect fraudulent credit card transactions in real time.
  • Intended Outcomes: Reduce fraud losses while minimizing false positives.
  • Target Domain: Financial services.
  • Business Value: Saves operational costs and builds consumer trust.
  • Supported Use Cases: Transaction scoring, fraud alerting, integration with payment workflows.
  • Consumer Scope: Enterprise risk and compliance teams.
  • Constraints: Requires structured transaction data, real-time inference API.
  • Exclusions: Not for anti-money-laundering detection or general anomaly detection.

Summary​

  • Purpose defines why the product exists.
  • Intent defines how and by whom it should be used.
  • Together, they provide a guardrail for trust, governance, and adoption.

Principle: An AI Product without clear purpose and intent risks becoming a black box applied everywhere — and trusted nowhere.