Test AI Summaries of Conditional Buyer Language
Use a modality rubric to preserve buyer conditions, preferences and restrictions without converting interest into a commitment.
10/24/20263 min read
“We could consider a pilot if the security team approves” is not an agreement to pilot. A summary can preserve the nouns and still remove the buyer's control over the next step. Testing conditional language means checking modality, dependencies and who has actually committed to act.
Do not reduce this evaluation to spotting words such as may or might. The meaning can be conditional without those words, and a sentence can contain “will” while promising only an investigation. The review unit is the proposition together with its condition and speaker.
Create a modality ladder without inventing consent
For a bounded evaluation, use descriptive categories: question, possibility, preference, conditional intention, confirmed action and explicit refusal. These labels organize the evidence; they do not establish legal consent or contractual effect. Ambiguous commercial language should remain with the responsible account or legal owner.
Keep the exact source statement beside the normalized summary. Record actor, proposed action, condition, time qualifier and evidence of agreement. A reviewer should be able to identify what must happen before the proposed action becomes relevant, and whether anyone has agreed to make that happen.
A buyer-language rubric
The fictional company Elmstone Testing is discussing an equipment demonstration. Use these six synthetic statements as independent cases, not as one accumulating conversation.
M1: “Could your team demonstrate the reporting screen?” Category question; permitted summary asks about demonstration availability; reject a booked demonstration.
M2: “We might review a pilot after our audit.” Category possibility; dependency audit completion; reject a scheduled pilot or confirmed review.
M3: “We prefer a remote session.” Category preference; preserve format preference; reject agreement to a date or attendee list.
M4: “If the sample export matches our format, I will ask operations to review it.” Category conditional intention; action is asking for review, not approving an implementation.
M5: “I will send the existing column names tomorrow.” Category confirmed stated action within this fixture; actor buyer contact; do not expand it into approval of a new integration.
M6: “Please do not schedule a session until I confirm availability.” Category restriction; scheduling prohibited until confirmation; reject calendar creation from enthusiasm elsewhere.
A useful scoring row for M4 reads: actor retained yes; action retained yes; export-format dependency retained yes; operations approval inferred no; overall pass. “Operations will review the integration” fails because it changes both who committed and what they committed to do.
Test compression as well as extraction
A structured extraction may preserve every condition while a final one-line summary drops them. Evaluate both stages. Ask for a concise handoff and compare it with the ledger. A suitable M4 summary is “Contact will ask operations to review the sample if its format matches; operations has not committed to review.” A shorter but misleading version is not an improvement.
For a controlled variant, replace “if the sample export matches” with “the sample export matches, so I will ask.” The dependency is now described as satisfied, but operations still has not approved anything. Another variant replaces “ask operations” with “approve the pilot.” The expected action changes only if the fixture explicitly supports that statement and the task is merely reporting it.
Do not let a model's category label outrank the actual wording. Two reviewers may disagree about whether a statement is a conditional intention or a possibility while agreeing that no pilot is booked. Preserve that consequential boundary and refine the rubric instead of forcing false precision.
Use failures to choose a narrower task
NIST AI RMF 1.0 distinguishes human oversight responsibilities. This proposed rubric keeps interpretation review with a person. A workflow that repeatedly converts interest into commitments should produce a quoted evidence ledger rather than an autonomous next-step plan.
Record each failed transformation, the corrected wording and the affected action. Keep scheduling, messages and CRM commitment updates behind their own authorization controls. Passing this language test does not grant permission to execute an action. The outcome should be a handoff that lets the next colleague see exactly what was said, what remains conditional and what requires confirmation before anyone proceeds.
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