Colay / Guides
Turn a model comparison into a vendor decision your team can review
A team needs more than “this answer looked best” to approve an AI vendor. Use a short comparison in Colay to collect examples, then write a decision memo that connects the evidence to your feature's requirements. The deliverable is a conditional choice with an owner and a next test, not a universal model ranking.
Separate the decision from the demonstration
Define what you are asking the team to approve: a discovery experiment, a limited pilot or a production dependency. A manual comparison may be enough to fund an integration experiment. It usually leaves important production questions unanswered, including service reliability, contracts and behavior under your actual configuration.
Write mandatory gates before scoring attractive qualities. If a feature must return a valid record with no unsupported fields, that requirement should not disappear inside an average that rewards fluent writing. Assign an owner to each gate: product defines acceptable behavior, engineering checks integration, and the responsible business reviewers confirm terms.
Give the review meeting a compact evidence packet
In Colay, collect initial answers using Ask separately. Give selected agents identical material and keep the responses available for review. If you later use Consensus to draft the memo, supply the packet explicitly. A confident synthesis cannot recover evidence that was never included.
NIST's AI Risk Management Framework treats risk considerations as part of AI design, development, use and evaluation. The memo below is our proposed working format, not a NIST certification or a claim that Colay completes a governance process.
- Feature and boundary: who uses the output, for what action, and what the model must never decide.
- Comparison conditions: source inputs, prompt version, candidate labels, date and limitations of the manual run.
- Evidence: representative successes, critical failures and unresolved cases, with the original outputs attached.
- Recommendation: preferred candidate, credible alternative, open gate, owner and date for reconsideration.
Worked example: choose a candidate for a limited pilot
Imagine a fictional product that drafts summaries from customer-supplied project notes. Candidate A writes the most polished summaries but invents an owner in one example. Candidate B produces plainer summaries and preserves the missing owner. Candidate C cannot be evaluated because the run returned no usable response. These are invented observations for explaining the decision format, not results from named models.
The team could choose B for an integration pilot while keeping A as an alternative after prompt revision. C remains untested, not inferior. No one can infer API uptime, contractual suitability or operating cost from these three observations. The memo should make that boundary easy to see.
| Decision field | What to record |
|---|---|
| Proposed choice | Pilot B for note summaries; no automatic customer actions |
| Evidence supporting it | Preserved unknown owner in the reviewed case |
| Strongest objection | Manual examples do not establish performance on live traffic |
| Open gate | Validate the intended API configuration and account terms |
| Revisit trigger | New critical failure, material cost change or changed requirements |
A prompt that preserves dissent
Ask a reviewer to read the strongest objection first. If that objection changes the choice, update the recommendation instead of burying it in a footnote. You can ask a second agent to critique the memo, but repeated endorsement is not independent evidence about the vendor.
Draft a decision memo from this evidence packet: [packet]. Decision requested: [experiment, pilot or production]. Mandatory gates: [gates]. Compare the candidates against those gates. Cite input IDs for every observed strength or failure. Distinguish untested from failed. Return recommendation, alternative, strongest objection, missing evidence, next test and owner placeholders. Do not invent prices, contract terms or performance figures. Do not resolve a missing gate by majority agreement.
Make approval narrow enough to act on
End the meeting with a named next step: who will test the real endpoint, what inputs they will use and what result stops the pilot. Keep the unchosen candidate's evidence so a future switch does not restart the investigation from memory.
Colay removes provider-key setup from this early end-user comparison; it does not supply your application's vendor agreement or an automated evaluation dashboard. Its subscription uses credits and limits. Start with the smallest comparison that can settle the current review question, then invest in integration evidence before widening the commitment.
Questions, answered
Can a team approve a vendor from a Colay comparison alone?
The comparison can support a scoped experiment. Production approval also needs evidence about the actual integration, access, terms and operational requirements.
What if the reviewers disagree?
Identify whether the disagreement concerns a requirement, an observed result or an unknown. Assign the next check to the relevant owner instead of averaging incompatible priorities.
Should the highest average score always win?
No. A candidate that fails a mandatory gate may be unsuitable even if it scores well on style or secondary features. Define gates before reviewing outputs.
Sources and methodology
- NIST — AI Risk Management Framework
Primary voluntary risk-management framework. The decision-memo format and fictional example are Colay editorial recommendations, not a certification.
Bring your next question to Colay
Choose a model, use Auto, or bring several perspectives together with Consensus.