Define the Work.Govern how it proceeds.
The Work establishes the undertaking—its purpose, intended outcome, scope, and what completion means. A Cognitive Contract governs how that Work may proceed: the authority in force, the Evidence that may support a decision, the actions permitted, the exceptions available, and the conditions that must hold before consequence or Settlement.
Cognitive Contracts at any scale
Start with the work.Add the authority it needs.
AI becomes dependable in day-to-day work when two different questions stay distinct. First: what is the undertaking—its purpose, intended outcome, scope, and what completion means? Then: under what authority may that Work proceed—what Evidence may support a decision, who may decide, what the system may change, where exceptions exist, and when a person must intervene?
For a customer-support assistant, an appropriately small Cognitive Contract might limit it to approved sources, require current Evidence for important claims, escalate sensitive or uncertain cases, and permit the creation of a support ticket under defined conditions. The Work specifies what resolution means, while a project can add budgets, review gates, and permissions. As requirements grow, departmental standards, enterprise-wide delegations, independent committees, separation of duties, and exception authorities can be incorporated without forcing every application to rebuild the organization’s governance.
scope: type: application id: app.customer-support-assistant # … - requirementId: evidence.approved-support-source sourceClasses: - approved-support-content freshness: maxAge: P30D # …effects: - effectId: effect.support.create-ticket capability: support.ticket.createApplication-scoped Contract excerpt showing scope, Evidence admission, and an eligible ticket-creation Effect.
Different stakeholders bring different kinds of authority to the undertaking. Product and engineering teams may start with an application or project, while business owners define the Work’s objective, scope, and intended outcome. Legal, Security, Privacy, Finance, Risk, and Compliance contribute the requirements and exceptions within their respective mandates; executives and governance bodies can establish reusable organizational authority that applies across the processes and applications dependent on it.
At enterprise scope, Indwel can model the organization itself: departments and domains; offices and reporting relationships; who may hold particular authority; delegations with subject, ceiling, geography or business-unit scope, effective dates, expiry, and subdelegation; separation of duties; committees and quorum; escalation paths; and the Cognitive Governors that represent independent decision authority. Those institutional facts can then govern every assistant, application, process, or piece of Work to which they apply.
When Work begins, Indwel resolves the Contract rules that apply to it: who may decide, what Evidence is sufficient, which actions are permitted, when a person must intervene, and which governed conditions must hold before Settlement. Cognitive Contracts can specialize that authority for an application, process, piece of Work, source, Objective, transition, question, or turn. Indwel records the resolved result as an Effective Governance Authority—a deterministic statement of the authority in force, the Evidence required, the approvals that matter, how independent Cognitive Governors combine, which Effects are eligible, and what Settlement requires. That identity travels with the Run, action, transition, Receipt, and continuing Chronicle so later review can recover the exact rules that governed the act.
Start at the scope that matters now. The same Contract model can grow with the Work, giving the organization reusable governance without forcing purpose, policy, and authority back into every application.
Strategic Contract Exception · Commercial commitment
A $28.4M agreement crossesseveral lines of authority.
Commercial leads the negotiation. Legal, Security, Privacy, Finance, and Executive Risk each retain authority over the parts of the agreement they own. Cognitive Contracts let the deal move forward as one governed matter without turning those independent responsibilities into a single approval chain.
The Commercial Director holds a defined delegation for ordinary terms up to $2 million, limited to specified classes of terms and unavailable for further delegation. This agreement exceeds that mandate, and its individual provisions bring different offices into the decision: General Counsel for unlimited liability, the CISO for non-standard security commitments, Privacy for a new processing jurisdiction, and Finance for extended payment terms or material credit exposure. A variance beyond ordinary authority reaches the Executive Risk Committee under its quorum rule. These are the organization’s existing decision rights, carried into the Work rather than reinvented inside contracting software.
The Work begins with the business objective: an executable customer agreement within the mandate defined for this matter. Materially changing that mandate requires competent authority and a Receipt, while the Cognitive Contract specifies the Evidence needed to support a decision. The current redline, economics, security material, data-processing terms, and credit information must establish their identity, version, freshness, custody, classification, corroboration, and contradiction status before the Evidence Firewall can admit them for use.
The participants retain their own decision rights as the matter moves toward agreement. Cognitive Governors represent those independent offices in the runtime, allowing each to permit, reject, qualify, redirect, or abstain within its jurisdiction without enlarging another office’s mandate. A legal approval cannot cancel a security rejection, and a required abstention keeps the matter unresolved; when a decision must be redirected or overridden, its competent authority, scope, reason, duration, and Receipt remain explicit.
Executive Risk can grant the specific enterprise exception available for this matter. It can vary the named liability limit and Commercial delegation ceiling for no more than 180 days, with compensating controls and its own Receipt. Security, Privacy, Finance, Evidence identity, and completion requirements remain governed by their own authority. The exception changes only what it explicitly names.
A decision and an action remain separate. In Cognitive Contracts, an Effect is a governed action that changes an external system or commits the business. Recording the approved exception is one Effect; creating the obligation register is another. Each Effect is bound to an eligible capability, any required review, an idempotency rule, a postcondition, a compensation path, and a Receipt. Indwel therefore knows which capability may act, under which authority, and what must be true afterward.
Settlement is the point at which the business can legitimately treat the Work as complete. The signed document must be the document that was authorized, the approved variance must appear in the executed language, continuing obligations must be assigned, required Effects must have verified, and no active veto may remain. A changed final document, new material term, expired exception, invalidated Evidence, or failed postcondition can reopen the same Work under explicit law. If a required office is temporarily unavailable, research, drafting, and Evidence gathering can continue while approval and consequential Effects remain withheld.
Constitutional source
From organizational authorityto runtime control.
This reference Contract family shows institutional authority in executable form: delegated authority, inherited scope, independent judgment, bounded exceptions, governed actions, and the conditions under which the Work may settle or reopen.
Governance teams can author Cognitive Contracts in YAML and validate them against JSON Schema. Indwel versions the Contract family, resolves inheritance and jurisdiction across documents, checks semantic consistency, and compiles the applicable rules into canonical runtime authority with a deterministic identity. The resulting Effective Governance Authority records the exact constitutional sources that governed the act.
# organization/reference-enterprise.organization.yaml · delegated commercial authority- delegationId: delegation.commercial-standard fromOffice: office.commercial-vp toOffice: office.commercial-director authorityClass: commercial.delegated scope: processIds: - process.contract-exception maxTotalContractValueUsd: 2000000 permittedTerms: - payment-terms - service-credit - renewal-term subdelegation: forbidden effectiveFrom: '2026-01-01' expiresAt: '2026-12-31'# examples/contract-exception-review/effective-authority.yaml · resolved constitutional lineagelineage:- contractId: org.reference-enterprise.constitution version: 1.0.0 scope: type: organization id: org.reference-enterprise# … exact source omitted …- contractId: process.contract-exception version: 4.0.0 scope: type: process id: process.contract-exception- contractId: work.contract-exception.acme-2026-041 version: 1.0.0 scope: type: work id: work.contract-exception.acme-2026-041# examples/contract-exception-review/03-process.overlay.yaml · non-expansive Governor composition composition: mode: non-expansive rules: - higher-order-reject-withholds - required-abstention-withholds - qualifications-accumulate - redirect-prevents-current-commit - permit-does-not-cancel-out-of-jurisdiction-rejection - commit-authority-finalizes# examples/contract-exception-review/03-process.overlay.yaml · bounded enterprise-risk exceptionexceptions:- exceptionId: exception.enterprise-risk varies: - legal.liability-limit - commercial.delegation-ceiling# … exact source omitted … authority: - authority.executive-risk duration: max: P180D mustExpire: true compensatingControls: - obligation.executive-risk-review - obligation.annual-contract-review receiptRequired: true# examples/contract-exception-review/03-process.overlay.yaml · governed Effect boundaryeffects:- effectId: effect.contract.record-approved-exception capability: contract-lifecycle.write reviewRequired: true idempotency: required postconditions: - path: external.contract.exceptionId op: eqPath valuePath: work.exception.exceptionId compensation: effect.contract.revoke-unexecuted-exception# examples/contract-exception-review/03-process.overlay.yaml · Settlement and reopeningsettlement: terminalStates: - settled - declined require: - final-document-identity-verified - approved-variance-preserved - obligations-assigned - no-active-vetoes reopening: triggers: - final-document-changed - material-term-added - exception-expired-before-signature - postcondition-failed# examples/contract-exception-review/cognitive-unit-tests.yaml · constitutional regression test- testId: legal-permit-cannot-erase-security-reject given: governor.legal-exception: permit governor.security: reject attempt: transition.approve-exception expect: disposition: withheld reasonCodes: - NON_EXPANSIVE_COMPOSITION_REJECTThe specimen shows the same business matter in executable form: inherited delegation, independent decision authority, a bounded exception, governed actions, completion and reopening rules, and a regression test. The compiled authority hash gives each consequential act a stable identity for Receipts, Chronicle custody, and later review.
Indwel architectureOrganizational authority becomes executable control.
Indwel starts with the institution’s delegations and policies, carries them into the rules of the Work, and applies those conditions when a capability is requested.
Financial Close Certification · Financial reporting
The books close when the companycan stand behind the result.
A $1.8 million revenue-recognition adjustment arrives after the Q3 2026 cutoff. It can change what the company is prepared to report about the quarter. The Contract establishes who has authority over the adjustment, which records support it, what independent review is required, and what must be true before the company certifies the close.
The Accounting Manager’s delegated ceiling is $250,000, and revenue recognition sits outside that delegation, so Controller authority enters the matter. Because the adjustment is material—large enough to affect the company’s financial statements or disclosures—the Disclosure Committee must act with a three-member quorum. Internal Audit keeps an independent right to challenge the treatment, and any open Audit challenge must be resolved before CFO certification. Seniority does not replace those responsibilities.
The Evidence is concrete: a complete general ledger at period end, bank reconciliations within five days, reconciled subledgers, support and materiality analysis for the adjustment, and a disclosure packet when required. A late-journal exception can vary the normal cutoff within its grant. Materiality review, Controller approval, Audit challenge resolution, and CFO certification remain required.
Indwel can reconcile accounts, surface anomalies, estimate materiality, draft accounting treatment, and prepare disclosure material while the decision is forming. Locking the ledger and publishing certification remain separate governed actions. Settlement requires the reconciliations, authorized material adjustments, resolved Audit challenge, disclosure review where required, CFO certification, and verified Effects. A later material correction or failed certification postcondition can reopen the close without rewriting the authority under which the earlier certification was made.
Production Release Authority · Consequential execution
Production authority followsthe exact build being released.
The release team is preparing build 417, with a matching manifest, test report, and rollback plan. The security assessment looks favorable, but it belongs to build 416; the problem is not necessarily the quality of the assessment, but that its Evidence cannot establish the release conditions for the artifact now being promoted.
The Security approval must belong to the exact build being released. In Cognitive Contracts, that is an Evidence-identity requirement: the favorable result for build 416 cannot authorize build 417. Release Owner, Security Owner, production executor, and rollback owner remain separate roles with separate authority. Approval to release, permission to execute in production, and authority to waive a Security requirement are each governed on their own terms.
The team can continue useful work while the missing Security Evidence is repaired. Analysis, Evidence gathering, and runbook preparation can proceed; approval, deployment, and rollback wait for their own requirements. An emergency route may change the scheduled deployment window and observation period within its authority, but the exact artifact, Security approval, and rollback capability still have to be established.
Deployment and rollback are separate governed Effects with their own capability binding, idempotency, postconditions, compensation, and Receipts. Settlement requires the deployment Receipt, verified production state, and no active vetoes. One Contract family therefore governs the information behind the decision, the people and offices entitled to make it, the capability that changes production, and the proof that the release reached its intended state.
Durable governance
Change the rules without losingthe history of the Work.
As policies evolve, reporting lines change, and delegations expire, the institution needs to know which rules governed each decision at the time it was made. Cognitive Contracts preserve that history while allowing new Work to use a newer version; undertakings already in progress move to revised authority only through a deliberate migration.
A reorganization, delegation expiry, policy change, or stricter Evidence standard can take effect without rewriting earlier decisions. The Chronicle preserves the source lineage, compiler version, effective authority hash, decisions, Effects, Receipts, Settlement state, and reopening history for the Work. The organization can therefore recover what was authoritative when each consequential act occurred.
Cognitive Unit Testing applies familiar software-testing discipline to governance. Teams can test both the expected path and the situations that should stop or redirect the work: delegation overreach, stale or contradictory Evidence, conflicting Governors, timeouts and abstentions, expired exceptions, failed Effect postconditions, Settlement, reopening, and migration. A new delegation or Contract version can be tested before it reaches live Work.
That creates portability at the institutional layer. Model providers, applications, retrieval strategies, orchestration, and execution tooling can change while the organization keeps control of jurisdiction, mandate, Evidence requirements, exception authority, Effects, and Settlement. A new application can join an organization already modeled and inherit the authority that applies to it.
From project to enterprise
Use Cognitive Contracts whereverAI crosses a boundary that matters.
A Cognitive Contract can govern one assistant, one project, one business process, or one consequential decision. Contract families can carry team, departmental, and enterprise authority across applications and models. The scope can be narrow or broad; the operating model stays consistent: the Work remains explicit, Evidence is admissible by rule, decision authority is competent, actions are bounded, and Settlement is governed.
Bring Indwel the Work you want to govern. We can map the authority, Evidence, permissions, exceptions, Effects, and Settlement law it needs, then carry that governance from a first project into the wider organization.