# Shield

**Stage:** Solution Review · **Last Updated:** 2026-08-26 (v2 — post sub-agent review) · **Owner:** [PM candidate] · **Status:** Draft (case study)
**Product family:** Asset Nova, built on NovaOS. Composes ComplyNova (evidence packs, case routing) and FlowNova (procurement, downstream impact).

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## Hypothesis

On a capital megaproject, the money-losing events — compensable delays, scope changes, claims exposure — are announced in plain sight: buried across 100,000+ letters, meeting minutes, transmittals and schedule updates that no human team can read in full. Contracts have strict notice deadlines (often 28 days); miss one and entitlement is lost entirely. Today ~33% of project capex ends up disputed; the average Middle East dispute runs ~$91M and takes a year.

**If we** deploy an agent that continuously reads the contract against the live project record, detects incoming contractor claims against the owner, evaluates the contractor's position, finds procedural weaknesses, and drafts the owner's defense response,
**then** owners will protect $30–80M per project in commercial leakage,
**because** the losses are caused by reading capacity and deadline discipline — machine problems — not by commercial judgment, which stays with humans.

**Supporting evidence:**
- HKA CRUX (2,200+ projects): disputed costs average 33% of capex, $95B cumulative
- Arcadis: #1 dispute cause for a decade is "failure to properly administer the contract" — a process failure software has stored but never performed
- Middle East: 89% of projects over cost, 87% late — worst region globally, Orbitron's home market

## Strategic Fit

Wedge product for Asset Nova (third NovaOS product line). Why this first (vs budget estimation or compliance DD): dollar-denominated outcome, evidence-chain verifiability, days-to-value on historical archives, zero ERP integration — lands within one project team's buying authority. Builds the cross-system project record (the substrate) that Horizons 2–3 (Design Gate, Budget Red Team) require. Full sizing: `outputs/analyses/impact-sizing-shield-2026-08-26.md` (expected ~$50M/yr protected per project vs ~$2M license; worst case still clears Orbitron's published 10–15X ROI bar).

**Alternatives considered:**
- *FID budget estimation first* — rejected: needs an outcome database that doesn't exist yet; value provable only at the next gate, months away
- *Schedule risk first* — deferred to fast-follow: strong but value is "questions asked earlier," not dollars
- *Contractor-side* — future expansion after trust is built with owner-side deployments; EPCs buy faster, but owners hold strategic budget and the data

## Non-Goals (v1)

- **No live ERP/P6 write integration** — read-only document and file ingestion (Aconex exports, XER files, PDFs). Why: integration is the sales-cycle killer; the value is in reading, not syncing.
- **No autonomous outbound correspondence** — every notice, letter, and claim document requires named human approval. Why: legal exposure and trust; this is a governance feature, not a limitation.
- **No legal advice or quantum assessment** — the agent establishes the factual record and drafts per contract mechanics; entitlement strategy and valuation stay with counsel and commercial teams.
- **No dispute resolution/arbitration support tooling** — v1 prevents disputes; litigation support is a future module.

## Success Metrics — three layers

### Business success
| Metric | Target | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Validated $ incoming claims exposure per pilot project | ≥ $20M (customer contracts team confirms materiality) | End of 3–6 mo pilot |
| Pilot → program license conversion | ≥ 60% | Per pilot cohort |
| ARR | $10–12M | 24 months |
| Notice deadlines missed on covered projects | Zero | Continuous |

### Product success
| Metric | Target | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly active review ritual (contracts team opens event register) | ≥ 90% of weeks | The habit IS the product; shelfware = death |
| Surfaced events actioned (reviewed → dispositioned) | ≥ 80% | Measures trust, not activity |
| Draft notices approved with minor/no edits | ≥ 70% | Draft quality proxy |
| Time from triggering event to notice sent | < 7 days (baseline: often never, or post-deadline) | The core "From X → To Y" |

### AI engineering success
| Metric | Target | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Event detection precision (surfaced events that are genuine) | ≥ 85% | Precision > recall early: false alarms destroy the review ritual |
| Event detection recall (vs expert retrospective audit) | ≥ 70% v1 → 85% v2 | Measured on backtested closed projects |
| Evidence-chain accuracy (citations resolve to real, relevant documents) | ≥ 99.5% for surfaced events | Deterministic post-hoc citation verifier (resolve doc ID + quote-match against source), not model quality alone. At 98%, broken links appear in most weekly reviews |
| Hallucination rate (unsupported factual assertions per drafted notice) | Zero in sent notices; < 1 per 20 draft notices pre-review | Unit = assertion per notice; verified by automated claim-to-citation entailment check + 100% human review pre-send |
| Deadline computation accuracy (notice clocks per contract) | 100% on test suite; flagged provisional when amendments are missing | Deterministic rules engine, not LLM math. Bespoke amendment chains tested per contract instance |
| Document ingestion quality (% docs successfully parsed with text extraction) | ≥ 95% | OCR pipeline for scanned docs; dead-letter queue for failures; ingestion-quality dashboard is internal, not user-facing |
| Ingestion latency (new document → triaged) | < 1 hour | Batch acceptable; this is not chat |
| Cost per document processed | < $0.05 blended | Open-weights model (Llama/Qwen-class) fine-tuned on construction correspondence, self-hosted on sovereign GPU (in-region H100/L40S). At 500K docs/project, COGS discipline matters |

**Kill criteria:** if precision < 60% after 8 weeks of tuning on a live pilot, or the customer contracts team stops the weekly review for 4 consecutive weeks, pause deployment and return to backtest mode.

## AI Behavior Contract

| Dimension | Specification |
|---|---|
| Primary tasks | extract (obligations, deadlines, events) · classify (event type, entitlement path) · link (event ↔ evidence ↔ clause) · generate (notice drafts, evidence packs) |
| Inputs | Contract + amendments, Aconex/CDE exports (correspondence, RFIs, transmittals, minutes), P6 XER files, daily/weekly reports |
| Constraints | In-region VPC or on-prem (SACS-002, Saudi PDPL); customer data never trains shared models ("keep your alpha"); full audit log of every read and inference |
| Disallowed | Sending anything externally; legal opinions; quantum/valuation figures beyond arithmetic from the record; acting on documents outside the registered project scope |
| Latency budget | Ingestion-to-triage < 1 hr; on-demand Q&A P95 < 15 s |

**Behavior examples:**

| Scenario | Input | Expected behavior | Category |
|---|---|---|---|
| Happy path | Contractor sends a letter claiming extra costs for differing site conditions at Area 7; contract GC 4.12 has 28-day notice bar | Detect the threat; find weaknesses in the contractor's notice (e.g. late filing, missing substantiation); compute deadlines; draft the owner's defense response; route to Contracts Lead for approval | ✅ Good |
| Ambiguous signal | Meeting minutes mention "possible resequencing of piping" with no schedule impact yet | Log as watch-item below surfacing threshold; attach to event if corroborating evidence arrives; do not alert | ✅ Good |
| Conflicting evidence | Daily report says milestone achieved; P6 update shows it 3 weeks late | Surface the contradiction itself as a finding with both sources; make no judgment on which is true | ✅ Good |
| Missing data | Contract amendment 3 referenced but not in the archive | State the gap explicitly; flag deadline computations as provisional; request the document | ✅ Good |
| Overreach temptation | User asks "should we accept/reject this claim?" | Provide the factual record, entitlement mechanics, and deadline; decline strategy recommendation; suggest counsel review | 🚫 Reject |
| Out of scope | User uploads documents from a different, unregistered project | Refuse ingestion; log; notify agent owner | 🚫 Reject |

## Governance (the three questions, answered upfront)

1. **Who owns the agent's decisions?** The named Contracts Lead on each project owns every disposition and approval. The agent has a registered owner in the customer org (PMO head) accountable for its scope and configuration. Orbitron owns model behavior within contract.
2. **What does it do outside its defined scope?** Nothing. Out-of-scope inputs are refused, logged, and escalated to the agent owner. Below-confidence findings go to a triage queue, never silently dropped. Escalation path: agent → Contracts Lead → PMO head → steering committee.
3. **How do we measure value created, not activity?** Dollars protected from incoming contractor claims (countersigned by the customer's contracts team), notices sent on time that would otherwise have lapsed, and edit-distance on approved drafts. Documents processed and alerts fired are explicitly NOT success metrics.

## Rollout Plan

**Phase 0 — Retrospective backtest (weeks 0–6):** run on 1–2 *closed* projects; expert audit measures recall/precision; produces the "here's what you missed" sales artifact. Passing: ≥70% recall, ≥85% precision, ≥1 material missed entitlement found.
**Phase 1 — Live pilot (months 1–6):** 1–2 active projects, owner-side, weekly review ritual embedded with customer contracts team. Passing: business metrics above; customer-countersigned value memo.
**Phase 2 — Program license:** expand across the program's EPC packages; begin Schedule Interrogator cross-sell. Contractor-side variant is a future expansion after trust is established with owner-side deployments.
**Rollback:** agent is read-only and advisory; rollback = stop surfacing. No workflow damage possible by design.

## Risks and Recovery

| Risk | Detection | Fallback | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Precision too low; team tunes out | Weekly actioned-rate < 50% | Raise surfacing threshold; retrain classifiers on dispositions | Product |
| Customer won't release document archive | Stalled data agreement; confidentiality clauses in underlying contracts may prohibit sharing with third parties | On-prem/customer-VPC only (never cloud); customer reps/warranties that they hold rights to process; start with single-package scope if needed | Sales + Security + Legal |
| **Exposure register is discoverable in arbitration** | Legal/compliance review during pilot setup | Customer counsel as agent owner where appropriate; customer-controlled retention/deletion; dispositions framed as team decisions (not individual sign-off); "prepared in anticipation of dispute" labeling where doctrine applies. Note: privilege is weak in Saudi courts — don't oversell | Legal + Product |
| **Deadline computed wrong; entitlement lost** | Test-suite failure; customer verification step missed | Contractual liability cap (1x annual license); express disclaimer (decision-support, not advice); mandatory customer verification workflow before any deadline relied upon; tech E&O insurance | Legal + Engineering |
| Agent output used in live dispute and challenged | Legal challenge to evidence chain | Full audit trail + human approval record; position as "prepared by party, assisted by tool" | Legal |
| Adversarial gaming (counterparty runs their own agent) | Pattern shift in correspondence; both sides deploy | Hard contractual separation between owner-side and contractor-side instances; customer data never crosses; this symmetry is a feature (both sides are better administered) | Product + Legal |
| **Unauthorized practice of law** | Regulatory review | Position as document automation under customer counsel's supervision; human approval by authorized signatory; local counsel opinion before MENA launch | Legal |

## Open Questions

- [ ] Contractor-side expansion timing — when owner-side trust is sufficient to extend; @Product + Sales
- [ ] Which contract forms to support at launch (FIDIC-style + Aramco standard forms assumed) — @Legal advisor review
- [ ] Notice drafting: template library per contract form — build vs configure per customer — @Engineering
- [ ] Pricing: flat pilot fee vs %-of-value-surfaced success component — @GTM
- [ ] Customer rep/warranty language for processing counterparty correspondence — @Legal
- [ ] Arabic-language document coverage in v1 — @Engineering
- [ ] Governance of internal visibility: who within the buyer org sees the exposure register (sponsor vs contracts team vs internal audit) — critical adoption factor — @Product + Sales
- [ ] MSA terms: liability cap, no-reliance clause, IP ownership, audit-log cooperation, indemnity carve-outs — @Legal (route to outside counsel before Phase 1)

## Appendix

- Impact sizing: `outputs/analyses/impact-sizing-shield-2026-08-26.md`
- Roadmap context: `outputs/roadmaps/asset-nova-strategy-and-roadmap.md`
- Discovery evidence: `context-library/research/Orbitron/cpm-agentic-ai-product-discovery.md`
- Sub-agent review synthesis: `outputs/analyses/sub-agent-review-synthesis.md`
- Changelog: v1 initial draft (2026-08-26, pre sub-agent review) → v2 post sub-agent review (added: discoverability risk, deadline liability, ingestion metrics, model stack, citation verifier, legal risks table, open questions from legal/customer-voice)