Handover Playbook
The Handover Playbook is six fill-in tables for moving AI leadership from an outside lead to a named owner, from the test to a later check.
Available as a page on this site. A repository copy is not published yet.
Published · Updated
What is inside
How to use it
Copy the tables into a spreadsheet or your own wiki. Fill them in with the outside lead and the person taking over, starting with table one. A blank cell is a decision nobody has made yet. Where I have set my own terms, they show how I run a handover. Change them where your company differs. Do not mark the handover done until the new owner has passed the test written in table one.
In my words
What this is
The Handover Playbook is a plan to fill in, not a finished one. It moves AI leadership from an outside lead to a named person inside your company. Most rows ask for a name, a place or a date; the rest ask for a decision. Only your company knows those. The reasons for each table, and how much weight each source carries, are in How to hand over AI leadership to an internal owner.
Stage 1. The owner and the test
Fill this in first. This playbook asks for a written test so that the handover can end on a result, not only on a date. The pilot article says the new owner should have written at least one eval case and watched the rollback rehearsal. The approach page has a related test of whether your engineers can roll back a bad model without waiting on the outside lead.
My test has three checks, and I judge each one. The new owner writes an eval case and runs a rollback rehearsal. The new owner also handles one incident without me in the room.
| Question | Your answer |
|---|---|
| Who takes the role? Write one name. | |
| Who decides whether to stop a launch, if that is a different person? | |
| What must the new owner do without the outside lead before the role moves? | |
| Who judges each check? | |
| What counts as a pass? Write it so a third person could judge it. | |
| What happens if the new owner is not ready on the planned date? |
Stage 2. What moves
My handover takes three months, in three phases. The month-one plan sets the end date, not the contract.
| Phase | Months | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Months one and two | The new owner and the outside lead work side by side. |
| 2 | Month three | The new owner leads. The outside lead reviews. |
| 3 | End of month three | The final test and the signatures. |
One row per item. Fill in who holds it today, who holds it after, where it lives and the date it moved. The reason for each row comes first, and its source where it has one, so you can drop a row you disagree with.
| Item | Why it is here | Held today by | Held after by | Where it lives | Done on |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Decisions and their reasons | A UK regulator says handover material should include judgement and opinion, not just facts and figures. FCA handbook, an analogy from financial firms. | ||||
| Work in progress | Status, owner and next action for each open item. Fractionus, one vendor’s advice. | ||||
| Open risks and concerns | The same regulator says the material should include unresolved or possible breaches and unresolved concerns raised by regulators. FCA handbook, an analogy. | ||||
| The list of AI systems | NIST asks for mechanisms to inventory AI systems. NIST AI RMF, Govern 1.6, voluntary. | ||||
| Roles and authority | NIST asks that roles, responsibilities and lines of communication are documented and clear. NIST AI RMF, Govern 2.1, voluntary. | ||||
| Runbook, evals and rollback | Google says training for a receiving team can include hands-on exercises in operations. Google SRE book, the operator’s own account. | ||||
| Monitoring and logs | NIST asks for monitoring plans that cover incident response and change management (Manage 4.1). For high-risk systems, deployers will have to keep the logs they control for at least six months. That duty starts on 2 December 2027 for Annex III systems and 2 August 2028 for Annex I systems. Article 26 of the EU AI Act. | ||||
| Outside parties | An interim director helps announce the new leader to funders and peers. CompassPoint, a practitioner’s guide for US nonprofits. | ||||
| Vendor and sub-processor contacts | Vendor and sub-processor contacts are not personal. They are a row in the AI register, and the renewal calendar moves with it. |
Stage 3. Who signs what
NIST AI RMF Govern 2.1 asks that roles, responsibilities and lines of communication are documented and clear. Its voluntary Playbook also suggests documenting delegated authorities. Write that down here for the handover. The rows are examples of decisions that carry a signature; no source lists them. Delete any that do not apply and add your own. For a high-risk system under the EU AI Act, ask counsel who must hold human oversight.
| Decision | Signs today | Signs after the handover date | Change takes effect on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entries in the AI register | |||
| Risk acceptances | |||
| Policy exceptions | |||
| Vendor and model approvals | |||
| Changes to eval thresholds | |||
| Rollback calls | |||
| Answers to customer security questionnaires | |||
| Serious incident calls |
Stage 4. Access
List every account the outside lead holds. Revoke them in one coordinated step on or before the last day, and do not leave removal to the outside lead. A marketplace that sells fractional executives gives this advice and asks for written confirmation. It is one vendor’s opinion.
The table lists six categories of account. The client’s internal owner or IT lead revokes each one, and the revocation is confirmed in writing the same day. A revoke-all line sits on the last-day checklist.
| Account or system | Granted by | Revoked by | Confirmed in writing on |
|---|---|---|---|
| The AI register | The client’s internal owner or IT lead | ||
| The LLM gateway | The client’s internal owner or IT lead | ||
| CI/CD | The client’s internal owner or IT lead | ||
| The cloud consoles | The client’s internal owner or IT lead | ||
| The vendor panels | The client’s internal owner or IT lead | ||
| The SSO admin | The client’s internal owner or IT lead |
Stage 5. After the last day
Sources agree that some reachable help is useful and differ on how much. Agree it in writing, with its length, scope and who may call. The middle column holds my terms where I have set them.
| Question | My terms | Your answer |
|---|---|---|
| Will the outside lead stay reachable, and for which questions? | Yes. Questions by email, answered within one working day. | |
| For how long, and in what fee shape? | Thirty days after the last day, with one review call on day 30. | |
| Who may call? | ||
| What is out of scope after the last day? | Anything beyond the email answers and the day-30 call is a separate agreement. |
Stage 6. The check after handover
Pick the date and the person who asks. The first question comes from one vendor’s advice to ask the successor about a month after the exit. The other rows are prompts. Add your own.
| Question | Date | Who asks | Answer |
|---|---|---|---|
| What do you wish you had known on day one? | |||
| Which decision since the handover was made without the outside lead? | |||
| Which item in the What moves table turned out to be missing? | |||
| Do customer paperwork and the AI register show the new name? |
What it is not
It is not a standard. A search in October 2026 found no standard, law or study that sets out how to hand over AI leadership, and no outcome study of AI-leadership handovers. Nothing shows that these tables lead to better results. It is not legal advice, and it is not a compliance certificate. The FAQ on how the Retainer ends covers how the Fractional CAIO Retainer ends.
No engagement has yet ended in a full handover by the method in these tables.
Sources and neighbours
Sources
- AI RMF Core: Govern and Manage functions
NIST · retrieved 2026-10-02
- AI RMF Playbook: Govern
NIST · retrieved 2026-10-02
- Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, Article 26: Obligations of deployers of high-risk AI systems
European Commission, AI Act Service Desk · retrieved 2026-10-02
- FCA Handbook SYSC 25.9: Handover procedures and material
UK Financial Conduct Authority · retrieved 2026-10-02
- Site Reliability Engineering, chapter 32: The Evolving SRE Engagement Model
Google · retrieved 2026-10-02
- Interim Executive Directors: The Power in the Middle
CompassPoint Nonprofit Services · retrieved 2026-10-02
- How to Offboard a Fractional Executive and Keep the Knowledge
Fractionus · retrieved 2026-10-02