The AI Agent Launch Checklist

Getting an AI agent to work in a demo is the easy part. Shipping it to real users or a team means answering the dull, important questions: what is it allowed to touch, what happens when it is wrong, who notices, and how much can it spend before someone gets paged. The AI Agent Launch Checklist turns those questions into twelve practical sections you can work through before launch and keep running afterwards, whether you are shipping a support chatbot, an internal assistant, or an automation that takes real actions.

Every section gives you checkbox items, a one-line "why" for each item so you can judge whether it applies to your setup, and red flags that tell you to pause the launch and fix something first. It covers least-privilege tool scoping, human confirmation for destructive actions, prompt injection and untrusted input, evals, cost limits, logging, human escalation, and user-facing disclosure, plus a launch-day runbook and a weekly review. It is built to help you catch common problems before your users do. It is practical guidance, not legal, security, or compliance advice, and it does not make any system secure or compliant on its own.

What's included

• 21-page PDF (US Letter, printable), with:
  • How to use it, including a simple three-tier risk guide (internal helper, user-facing, takes actions)
  • 12 checklist sections: Scope and success criteria · Prompt/system instructions review · Tool and permission scoping · Data privacy and secrets · Prompt injection and untrusted input · Evals and test set · Cost limits and rate limits · Logging and observability · Human escalation and fallback · User-facing disclosure and copy · Launch-day runbook · Weekly post-launch review
  • 96 checklist items, each with a short why, plus red flags for every section
  • 1-page Master Launch Checklist with exceptions and sign-off
  • Eval test-case template with a worked example and a blank run sheet
  • Incident log template: severity guide, incident record, and running log
  • Further reading (OWASP and NIST frameworks) and a glossary
• Editable DOCX with clickable checkboxes in Microsoft Word
• Markdown/Notion ZIP: one page per section with to-do checkboxes, plus CSV files for an eval database and an incident database

Please note

This is a digital product; nothing physical ships. It is practical operating guidance, not legal, security, privacy, or compliance advice. For high-stakes systems, have a qualified professional review your setup.