TL;DR

Most executive decision briefs fail before the recommendation is written. The problem is usually not a lack of information. It is that the decision itself has never been bounded precisely enough. Scope, authority, mandatory constraints, economic assumptions, evidence quality, reversibility, ownership, and the consequence of waiting become mixed together inside a presentation that describes the issue without making the decision easier.

The Executive Decision Brief and Recommendation prompt is designed to correct that. It forces an AI assistant to behave more like a disciplined decision analyst than a persuasive writing engine. It requires a viable current-state option, separates hard gates from comparative criteria, distinguishes different kinds of cost and benefit, exposes contrary evidence, records uncertainty, and defines what would cause the recommendation to change.

The goal is not to make AI decide for executives. The goal is to make the evidence, tradeoffs, assumptions, ownership, and requested decision difficult to hide.

Introduction

A steering committee receives forty slides on a platform decision.

The architecture is polished. The vendor comparisons are detailed. Finance has several numbers. Security has concerns. Operations has questions about ownership. Procurement has contract issues. The project team wants approval before the end of the quarter.

Then someone asks the simplest question in the room:

What, exactly, are we approving today?

The answer should be obvious. Too often, it is not.

One team believes the meeting is approving a vendor. Another believes it is approving funding. Architecture thinks the decision covers a production standard. Finance believes it covers only a pilot. Operations assumes staffing will be addressed later. Security believes its unresolved findings remain gating items.

Everyone has reviewed the same material, yet they are not making the same decision.

That is the problem this prompt is designed to solve.

An executive decision brief should not be a compressed project presentation. It should be a controlled interface between evidence and authority. The reader should be able to identify the exact decision, viable alternatives, constraints, economic consequences, material risks, evidence gaps, accountable owners, and the next irreversible commitment without reconstructing the argument from thirty pages of background material.

AI can help assemble that brief. It can normalize options, calculate supplied inputs, expose missing assumptions, structure sensitivity analysis, compare alternatives consistently, and make the final output easier to review.

It should not invent the facts that make the recommendation valid.

The Real Problem Is Decision Ambiguity

A weak executive brief often begins with a topic:

Modernize the data platform.

Select an AI vendor.

Approve the cloud migration.

Fund the automation program.

Replace the current infrastructure platform.

Those are subjects, not decisions.

A defensible decision needs an actor, action, scope, timing, outcome, and constraint boundary.

The prompt therefore forces the issue into a much stronger form:

Should [decision owner] choose or authorize [option or action] for [scope] by [date] in order to achieve [business outcome], within [constraints]?

That sentence performs more work than it appears to.

It identifies who has authority. It prevents implementation questions from being smuggled into an approval that does not cover them. It establishes the deadline. It states the outcome against which the decision should later be evaluated. It also exposes when the organization is attempting to make a decision without defining the constraints that determine whether an option is viable.

Consider the difference.

Weak question:

Which infrastructure platform should we choose?

Decision-ready question:

Should the architecture review board authorize Platform A, Platform B, or continued operation of the current environment for the regulated analytics service before the current support decision point, while meeting the approved recovery, security, staffing, and budget constraints?

The second question can be challenged.

That is a feature.

A Decision Brief Is a Control System, Not a Summary

The most useful mental model for this prompt is a control system.

Information enters from different parts of the organization. The decision model rejects invalid options, compares viable ones, exposes uncertainty, and produces a recommendation that remains connected to its evidence.

The recommendation is only one output.

The system must also preserve why that recommendation was made and what conditions would invalidate it.

The point to notice is the hard gate.

An option that violates a mandatory regulatory, security, timing, compatibility, budget, recovery, or contractual requirement should not receive enough points in unrelated categories to become acceptable.

That is one of the most important protections in the prompt.

Hard Constraints Should Not Be Averaged Away

Weighted decision matrices are useful when they compare valid options.

They become dangerous when they are used to make an invalid option look acceptable.

Suppose an option performs extremely well on cost, user experience, strategic alignment, and deployment speed but cannot satisfy a mandatory data-residency requirement.

Giving residency a score of 2 out of 5 and then compensating for it with strong scores elsewhere is a category error.

The option failed a gate.

The prompt explicitly separates minimum thresholds from comparative factors so the decision model can distinguish between:

• must be true, and
• better or worse than the alternatives.

A practical criteria model might look like this:

Criterion	What is being tested	Evidence	Minimum threshold	Treatment
Regulatory fit	Required legal or policy conditions	Legal review, control mapping	All mandatory obligations supported	Gate
Recovery	Ability to meet required service recovery	Recovery design and test evidence	Approved recovery objective	Gate
Budget	Total commitment within authority	Cost model	Within authorized boundary	Gate
Business value	Contribution to desired outcome	Baseline and benefit model	Defined by program	Comparative
Time to value	Time until useful production outcome	Delivery plan, dependencies	Defined by deadline	Gate or comparative
Operating burden	Skills, support, tooling, lifecycle work	Operating model	Supportable by available capacity	Comparative
Strategic fit	Alignment with approved direction	Roadmap and standards	No prohibited conflict	Comparative
Reversibility	Cost and difficulty of changing course	Exit design, contract terms	Depends on decision	Comparative
Evidence quality	Strength of evidence behind the assessment	Tests, records, source quality	Minimum confidence where required	Comparative

Weights can still be useful after the gates are applied.

The order matters.

The Current State Must Be a Real Option

Decision briefs frequently create false choices.

Option A is the preferred proposal.

Option B is expensive.

Option C is deliberately unattractive.

The current state disappears.

That makes the decision look more certain than it is.

Sometimes continuing the current approach is genuinely unacceptable. Support may be ending. Capacity may be exhausted. Regulatory exposure may be growing. A contractual deadline may be approaching.

When that is true, show the evidence.

Otherwise, retaining the current state, optimizing it, deferring the change, or authorizing discovery instead of implementation should remain legitimate options.

A useful comparison therefore asks:

Option	What commitment does it make?	What value might it create?	What risk remains?	What new risk appears?	How reversible is it?
Continue current state	Minimal new commitment	Preserves stability and capital	Existing problem persists	Delay may increase future cost	Usually high initially
Improve current state	Limited change	May address immediate constraints	Structural issues may remain	Investment may have short useful life	Moderate to high
Adopt Option A	Material commitment	Target business outcome	Implementation risk	New dependencies and lock-in	Varies
Adopt Option B	Material commitment	Alternative outcome path	Different delivery risk	Different dependency model	Varies
Defer pending evidence	Buys information	Reduces uncertainty	Delays benefit	Delay cost may grow	High

The do-nothing option does not need to win.

It needs to be evaluated honestly.

Evidence Quality Has to Travel With the Claim

Executive recommendations often flatten radically different evidence into one narrative.

A production benchmark and a vendor demonstration are presented beside each other.

A finance estimate and an approved budget are treated as interchangeable.

A stakeholder preference becomes “the business wants.”

A prototype becomes proof that the operating model is ready.

The prompt prevents that by forcing each material claim into an evidence class:

• verified by direct evidence
• reported by a stakeholder or vendor
• calculated from supplied inputs
• supported inference
• assumption
• unknown

That classification changes the conversation.

“The platform will reduce operating cost by 25 percent” sounds definitive.

“Finance model estimates a 15 to 30 percent operating-cost reduction under current utilization and labor assumptions” tells the decision-maker something useful.

The second statement exposes where the number came from and what could change it.

Evidence quality should affect confidence even when the underlying claim is favorable.

AI Should Not Upgrade Weak Evidence Into Strong Prose

This is where generative AI creates a specific governance problem.

Language models are exceptionally good at turning incomplete material into coherent language. That is valuable for drafting. It can also make weak evidence look finished.

A stakeholder says implementation should take six months.

A vendor says integration is straightforward.

A proof of concept succeeds with one use case.

A rough spreadsheet contains estimated savings.

An AI assistant can combine those inputs into a polished paragraph that sounds as though schedule, integration feasibility, production readiness, and financial returns have all been demonstrated.

They have not.

The prompt therefore instructs the model not to invent:

• financial returns
• stakeholder consensus
• production readiness
• approval
• implementation status
• validation
• unsupported precision

For consequential external facts, it also requires source verification and contextual details such as date, version, or jurisdiction when those details affect applicability.

NIST’s Generative AI risk guidance is useful context here. The point is not that every executive brief needs an AI compliance exercise. The point is that using generative AI to produce decision material does not eliminate the need to manage the reliability and provenance of the information entering that material.

The model can organize the evidence.

It cannot manufacture the missing evidence.

Economics Need More Than a Single ROI Number

A weak business case often compresses several fundamentally different concepts into one number.

Labor capacity is called savings.

Avoided future spending is counted as cash returned.

Risk reduction is blended with revenue.

An unused budget is treated as realized value.

Infrastructure cost excludes internal engineering.

Exit cost disappears from the model.

The Executive Decision Brief prompt forces the analysis to separate major economic categories.

Cost categories that should remain visible

The brief distinguishes:

• one-time implementation cost
• recurring operating cost
• internal labor and capacity
• integration and data work
• security, compliance, and governance
• training, adoption, and organizational change
• support and maintenance
• contract and switching costs
• exit and decommissioning
• opportunity cost

That separation matters because the same total can represent very different operating commitments.

A platform that costs less to acquire but requires significantly more specialist labor may not be economically equivalent to a higher-priced managed alternative.

A three-year contract may appear attractive until minimum commitments, migration costs, exit terms, and internal integration work are included.

Benefit categories also need separation

The prompt prevents several benefit types from being collapsed into a generic “value” number.

It distinguishes:

• capacity released
• cost avoided
• cash saved
• revenue created
• risk reduced
• strategic option value

Those are all potentially important.

They are not interchangeable.

If a change frees two engineers from repetitive operational work, the organization may gain usable capacity without reducing payroll expense. That can still be valuable, but calling it cash savings would overstate the financial result.

Use Ranges Before False Precision

A recommendation usually becomes less reliable when uncertain inputs are expressed with excessive precision.

If three major cost assumptions are still estimates, a business case that predicts a 17.43-month payback has not become more rigorous by adding decimal places.

The better approach is to expose uncertainty.

The prompt calls for ranges, sensitivity analysis, and explicit drivers.

That is consistent with established appraisal and cost-estimating disciplines. HM Treasury’s Green Book evaluates options through costs, benefits, risks, and evidence. The U.S. Government Accountability Office cost-estimating guidance emphasizes assumptions, sensitivity analysis, risk analysis, documentation, and updating estimates as actual information becomes available.

A useful executive view might therefore show:

Variable	Lower case	Expected case	Upper case	What changes the estimate
Implementation effort	Range	Range	Range	Integration complexity
Adoption	Range	Range	Range	Workflow fit and training
Recurring platform cost	Range	Range	Range	Usage and contract structure
Internal support demand	Range	Range	Range	Automation and maturity
Benefit realization	Range	Range	Range	Adoption and process redesign

The purpose is not to create three speculative forecasts.

It is to show which assumptions control the decision.

The Best Evidence Against the Recommendation Belongs in the Brief

Many decision documents contain a section called “risks.”

That is not the same as presenting the strongest credible case against the recommendation.

A risk register may describe implementation problems after Option A is selected.

Contrary evidence asks whether Option A should be selected at all.

The prompt explicitly requires both:

• strongest evidence supporting the recommendation
• strongest credible evidence against it

That requirement is unusually valuable because it makes advocacy harder to disguise as analysis.

A vendor may have the strongest capability fit but unfavorable exit terms.

A platform may have the best projected economics but the weakest production evidence.

A modernization program may have strong long-term value but unacceptable near-term staffing risk.

A lower-cost option may depend on optimistic adoption assumptions.

The recommendation can still stand.

It should stand after the contrary evidence is visible.

Reversibility Changes How Much Evidence You Need

Not every decision deserves the same burden of proof.

Approving a two-week discovery exercise is different from signing a five-year contract.

Running a bounded pilot is different from declaring an enterprise standard.

Testing an architecture is different from migrating the regulated production estate.

The size of the evidence requirement should rise with the size and irreversibility of the commitment.

This creates a better response to uncertainty.

If the evidence is insufficient for full approval, the answer does not have to be “no.”

It may be:

Authorize the smallest reversible step that resolves the most important uncertainty.

That is far more useful than allowing an AI system to invent enough confidence to complete the requested recommendation.

A Lower-Scoring Option Can Still Be the Correct Recommendation

Weighted scorecards are decision aids, not decision authorities.

The prompt explicitly says to recommend the option with the best overall fit rather than blindly selecting the highest raw score.

That distinction matters when:

• one option violates a hard constraint
• one risk has disproportionate downside
• a strategic requirement overrides marginal scoring differences
• one option creates severe lock-in
• a slightly weaker option preserves significantly more reversibility
• evidence quality varies materially between options

A score of 84 versus 81 does not prove that one architecture, vendor, investment, or operating model is better.

It proves that a particular scoring model produced 84 and 81.

The assumptions behind the scoring model remain part of the decision.

The Recommendation Should Be Conditional

A strong executive recommendation is not a permanent declaration.

It is a conclusion based on the current evidence set.

That means the brief should answer a question many recommendations ignore:

What would change your mind?

The prompt requires explicit recommendation-change conditions such as:

• acquisition or implementation cost exceeds a threshold
• a required test fails
• a new regulatory requirement appears
• production performance misses the acceptance level
• a critical dependency becomes unavailable
• contract terms materially change
• a customer requirement changes the scope
• staffing cannot be secured
• new evidence contradicts a key assumption

This turns the recommendation into something that can be governed after approval.

It also gives teams a rational way to reopen a decision without pretending that the original analysis was necessarily wrong.

Ownership Is Part of the Recommendation

A decision with no owner is usually an intention.

The prompt therefore extends beyond option selection and into execution governance.

It asks for:

• accountable executive
• delivery owner
• technical owner
• risk or compliance owner
• funding source
• first milestone
• decision gates
• success measures
• stop conditions
• escalation path

That is important because executive approval often transfers risk into delivery teams without transferring decision clarity.

Operations inherits support.

Security inherits exceptions.

Finance inherits spend.

Architecture inherits technical debt.

The project team inherits a deadline.

A useful decision brief makes those consequences visible before authorization, not after.

The Executive Output Is Intentionally Shorter Than the Analysis

The analysis can be substantial.

The executive output should not be.

The prompt produces ten decision-facing sections:

Executive section	Question it answers
Recommendation	What should be done?
Decision required	What exactly needs approval now?
Executive rationale	Why is this the recommended direction?
Options comparison	What realistic alternatives were considered?
Economics	What does the decision cost and what value may result?
Risks and mitigations	What could materially damage the outcome?
Execution path	What happens immediately after approval?
Change conditions	What would invalidate the recommendation?
Evidence gaps	What remains uncertain enough to matter?
Decision record	What was ultimately decided, by whom, and under what conditions?

This is the right compression boundary.

Technical detail belongs in the analysis when it materially affects value, risk, feasibility, cost, schedule, operability, or confidence.

Everything else can stay out of the executive path.

How to Use the Prompt in Practice

This prompt works best when it receives an evidence pack rather than a vague question.

For a vendor decision, provide pricing, contract terms, requirements, evaluation results, technical findings, support boundaries, security review, stakeholder positions, and known unknowns.

For an architecture decision, provide current-state diagrams, workload constraints, recovery objectives, capacity information, integration boundaries, support models, cost inputs, lifecycle concerns, and implementation evidence.

For an investment decision, provide the current baseline, cost structure, benefit hypothesis, timing, resource needs, dependencies, risk appetite, and decision authority.

The practical workflow is simple:

1. Define the decision owner and exact approval boundary.
2. Supply the strongest available evidence, including conflicting evidence.
3. Keep unknowns visible instead of filling them with optimistic assumptions.
4. Run the analysis and inspect the gates, economics, contrary evidence, and evidence classification before accepting the recommendation.
5. Re-run the brief when material evidence changes and preserve the previous decision record.

For high-impact decisions, the AI-produced brief should be reviewed by the domain owners whose evidence it summarizes. A coherent document is not proof that the inputs were correct.

Copy-Ready Executive Decision Brief and Recommendation Prompt

The following prompt is designed for enterprise decisions where the recommendation must survive executive, finance, technical, operational, procurement, security, or governance scrutiny.

ROLE

You are a senior enterprise advisor preparing a decision brief for [decision owner or governing body].

Your responsibility is to make a specific decision easier, faster, and more defensible.

Lead with the recommendation.

Include only the technical or operational detail that materially affects value, cost, risk, timing, feasibility, or confidence.

DECISION REQUEST

• Exact decision question: [State the decision as a question]
• Decision owner: [Named role, committee, customer, or governing body]
• Decision deadline: [Date or triggering event]
• Requested decision: [Approve, reject, select, fund, defer, authorize discovery, authorize pilot, or other]
• Scope of authority: [What the decision owner can approve]
• Matters outside this decision: [Explicit exclusions]

BUSINESS CONTEXT

• Business objective: [Desired outcome]
• Current state: [What exists today]
• Problem or opportunity: [Why a decision is needed]
• Consequence of delay: [Financial, operational, strategic, customer, security, or other]
• Stakeholders affected: [Groups and nature of impact]
• Time horizon: [Immediate, annual, multi-year, or other]
• Strategic commitments: [Existing roadmaps, contracts, standards, policies, or customer commitments]
• Risk tolerance: [Describe acceptable and unacceptable exposure]

OPTIONS AND CONSTRAINTS

• Options already identified: [List]
• Current-state or do-nothing option: [Describe]
• Mandatory requirements: [Requirements]
• Decision criteria: [Value, total cost, time to value, feasibility, risk, strategic fit, customer impact, security, compliance, reversibility, operability, or other]
• Criterion weights: [Optional weights totaling 100 percent]
• Budget boundary: [Capital, operating, total, or unknown]
• Schedule boundary: [Required timing]
• Resource boundary: [People, skills, capacity, infrastructure]
• Technology or vendor constraints: [Constraints]
• Regulatory, legal, contractual, or policy constraints: [Constraints]

EVIDENCE AVAILABLE

• Financial data: [Inputs]
• Operational data: [Inputs]
• Customer or user evidence: [Inputs]
• Technical evidence: [Tests, benchmarks, designs, compatibility evidence]
• Risk and compliance evidence: [Assessments, policies, findings]
• Stakeholder positions: [Who supports or opposes each option and why]
• External sources: [Research, official documentation, filings, standards]
• Known evidence gaps: [Unknowns]

DECISION QUALITY RULES

1. Frame one decision precisely. Separate the approval required now from later implementation decisions.
2. Include the current-state, defer, or do-nothing option when it is viable. Do not create a false choice among only favored options.
3. Evaluate every option against the same defined criteria. Explain the direction of each score and any weighting method.
4. Treat hard constraints as gates, not as scores that can be offset by unrelated benefits.
5. Separate:
   • One-time implementation cost
   • Recurring operating cost
   • Internal labor and capacity
   • Integration and data work
   • Security, compliance, and governance cost
   • Training, adoption, and change-management cost
   • Support and maintenance cost
   • Contractual or switching cost
   • Exit and decommissioning cost
   • Opportunity cost
6. Use ranges and sensitivity analysis when inputs are uncertain. Do not create false precision.
7. Distinguish capacity released, avoided cost, cash savings, revenue, risk reduction, and strategic option value. Do not combine them as though they are equivalent.
8. Identify the strongest evidence supporting the recommendation and the strongest credible evidence against it.
9. Treat vendor claims, stakeholder preferences, prototypes, demonstrations, and isolated customer requests as inputs, not independent proof of production value or market demand.
10. Identify technical, operational, security, privacy, compliance, procurement, adoption, staffing, and dependency risks.
11. Evaluate reversibility, lock-in, transition cost, failure containment, and the ability to exit.
12. State the evidence or future condition that would change the recommendation.
13. Do not invent financial returns, stakeholder consensus, readiness, approval, implementation status, or validation.
14. Verify current, consequential external facts through authoritative sources when available. State the date, product version, jurisdiction, and limitation.
15. Recommend staged discovery, a pilot, or a reversible commitment when the evidence is insufficient for full approval.

ANALYSIS WORKFLOW

Clarify the Decision

Write the decision in this form:

Should [decision owner] choose or authorize [option or action] for [scope] by [date] in order to achieve [business outcome], within [constraints]?

If the question cannot be framed this way because scope or authority is unclear, identify the missing decision boundary before proceeding.

Define the Evaluation Model

Create a criteria table with:

• Criterion
• Definition
• Measurement or evidence
• Weight, if used
• Minimum acceptable threshold
• Whether it is a gate or a comparative factor

Do not weight criteria after seeing results unless the change is disclosed and justified.

Assess the Evidence

For each material claim, identify whether it is:

• Verified by direct evidence
• Reported by a stakeholder or vendor
• Calculated from supplied inputs
• A supported inference
• An assumption
• Unknown

Identify conflicts in the evidence and the source with the strongest authority, currency, and applicability.

Do not silently resolve conflicting evidence.

Compare the Options

For each option assess:

• Ability to meet the business outcome
• Required capabilities and dependencies
• Time to initial value and time to full value
• Total cost and main cost drivers
• Delivery and integration complexity
• Security, privacy, legal, and compliance exposure
• Operating model and ownership
• Skills and support needs
• Customer and workforce impact
• Failure modes and reversibility
• Strategic fit and lock-in
• Quality of supporting evidence

Use qualitative ratings unless a defined quantitative method and reliable data are available.

Form the Recommendation

Recommend the option with the best overall fit, not merely the highest raw score.

Explain any case where a lower-scoring option wins because of a hard constraint, disproportionate risk, strategic requirement, or better reversibility.

If no option is adequately supported, recommend the smallest discovery step that would resolve the most important uncertainty.

Define Execution and Governance

Specify:

• Accountable executive
• Delivery owner
• Technical owner
• Risk or compliance owner
• Funding source
• First milestone
• Decision gates
• Success measures
• Stop conditions
• Escalation path

REQUIRED EXECUTIVE OUTPUT

1. Recommendation
   • One direct sentence stating what should be done.
2. Decision required
   • Exact approval, selection, rejection, deferral, or funding decision.
   • Required decision date.
3. Executive rationale
   • Three to five concise reasons tied to business outcome and decision criteria.
4. Options comparison
   • Table with option, value, cost, time, feasibility, risk, strategic fit, reversibility, operational burden, and evidence quality.
5. Economics
   • One-time and recurring cost.
   • Expected benefit categories.
   • Calculation method and assumptions.
   • Payback or value range only when supported.
   • Sensitivity drivers.
6. Risks and mitigations
   • Material risk, likelihood, impact, mitigation, owner, residual exposure, and trigger.
7. Execution path
   • Immediate next action, owner, timing, dependencies, decision gates, and success criteria.
8. Conditions that would change the recommendation
   • New evidence, cost threshold, failed test, regulatory change, customer requirement, or dependency change.
9. Evidence gaps and unresolved decisions
   • Include only gaps that could materially affect the decision.
10. Decision record

• Decision date, decision owner, selected option, conditions, review date, and evidence version.
• Leave fields blank if the decision has not yet been made.

WRITING REQUIREMENTS

• Put the recommendation and required decision first.
• Use clear, human business language.
• Avoid hype, vague transformation claims, and unnecessary jargon.
• Do not bury a material risk in an appendix or footnote.
• Do not present a proposal as approved or a pilot as production evidence.
• Do not present a single estimate as certain when a range is warranted.
• Keep implementation detail proportional to its effect on the decision.

FINAL QUALITY GATE

Before delivering, confirm that:

• The decision owner can tell exactly what is being requested.
• Options were evaluated consistently.
• The recommendation is supported by evidence rather than preference.
• Cost, risk, ownership, dependencies, and next step are visible.
• Material uncertainty and contrary evidence are not hidden.
• No approval, commitment, or implementation status was invented.

Where This Prompt Is Strongest

This framework is intentionally broader than a vendor-selection template.

It is useful when several disciplines need to agree on one consequential decision:

• architecture direction
• platform selection
• cloud or infrastructure investment
• enterprise AI adoption
• acquisition or vendor selection
• organizational change
• modernization programs
• outsourcing or managed services
• program funding
• production authorization
• discovery or pilot approval
• major contract renewal
• build-versus-buy decisions

Its strongest use case is any decision where the executive recommendation will later be challenged with one of these questions:

Who approved this?

What alternatives did we consider?

What evidence did we have?

What did we assume?

What did it cost?

Who owned the risk?

What would have caused us to stop?

Those questions should not require forensic reconstruction six months later.

The decision brief should already contain the answers.

Common Failure Modes When Using the Prompt

The framework is disciplined, but poor inputs can still produce weak output.

Starting With a Preferred Answer

If the evidence pack includes only the preferred proposal, the prompt cannot perform a meaningful alternatives analysis.

Provide viable alternatives and the current state.

Treating Stakeholder Confidence as Evidence

A senior executive may strongly support an option.

That is relevant context.

It is not independent evidence of technical feasibility, financial return, security, or operational readiness.

Using Arbitrary Weights

A weighted matrix can make subjective preferences look mathematical.

Agree on the criteria before scoring where possible. Document any later weighting change.

Ignoring the Cost of Delay

Deferral is not free when a deadline, support boundary, security exposure, capacity constraint, customer requirement, or market opportunity is deteriorating.

If delay has a measurable consequence, include it.

Ignoring Exit Cost

A decision model that covers acquisition but not exit understates commitment.

Include migration, data extraction, retraining, contract termination, decommissioning, stranded investment, and replacement effort where material.

Asking the AI to Resolve Missing Evidence

Unknown should remain unknown until evidence exists.

The prompt should produce a discovery action, not fictional confidence.

The Decision Record Is the Long-Term Asset

The executive presentation will eventually disappear into a document repository.

The decision record is what should survive.

It should preserve:

• the question that was actually decided
• the evidence available at the time
• the alternatives considered
• the assumptions that mattered
• the conditions attached to approval
• the owners
• the review trigger
• the version of the evidence set used

That creates something more valuable than a polished memo.

It creates organizational memory.

ISO 31000 treats risk management as a continuing process involving identification, analysis, evaluation, treatment, monitoring, and communication. The same principle applies here: a major decision should not become detached from the conditions under which it was made.

A decision can be reasonable when approved and wrong six months later because the environment changed.

The answer is not to pretend the first decision should have predicted everything.

The answer is to record the assumptions and define when the organization will revisit them.

Conclusion

The strongest executive decision brief is not the one with the most analysis.

It is the one that makes the actual decision unmistakable.

A defensible brief separates hard constraints from preferences, viable alternatives from straw men, evidence from assumptions, cash savings from released capacity, production evidence from prototypes, risk from advocacy, and approval from implementation.

The Executive Decision Brief and Recommendation prompt gives an AI assistant a useful job inside that process. It can organize the decision, normalize the options, expose weak evidence, calculate supplied inputs, identify sensitivity drivers, surface contrary evidence, structure risk, and produce a compact executive output.

The executive or governing body still owns the decision.

The practical next question is therefore not, “Can AI recommend an answer?”

It is:

Can the organization show exactly what evidence justified the commitment, who accepted the remaining risk, and what future condition would cause the decision to be reopened?

External References

• HM Treasury: The Green Book (2026)
• U.S. Government Accountability Office: Cost Estimating and Assessment Guide: Best Practices for Developing and Managing Program Costs
• ISO: ISO 31000:2018 Risk management – Guidelines
• National Institute of Standards and Technology: Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework: Generative Artificial Intelligence Profile

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