The output is not
the record.
If someone used AI to draft advice, assess a risk or summarise a document, keeping the answer is not enough. What makes it a record is everything that produced it: the documents that went in, the prompts that shaped it, the replies along the way, and evidence of whether anyone acted on the result. Evidarch keeps a conversation as one thing, because that is the unit an archivist appraises and a court asks for.
Four parts, kept together or not kept at all.
The National Archives guidance on AI-generated records is specific about this: where the output has ongoing value, the supporting material — the prompts and the source data — has to be retained with it for the record to mean anything.
The inputs
Every document, image or dataset handed to the AI tool, kept as the original file. This is the half most often lost, because it never touches a document management system on its way into a browser.
The prompts
What was actually asked, including the follow-ups that steered the answer. Captured at the moment of submission rather than inferred afterwards, so a short question typed quickly is not missed.
The responses
What the model said back, each turn of it, with the model and vendor named. The reasoning behind a decision is usually here rather than in the final output.
The use
Whether the output left the tool — copied to the clipboard, or downloaded. Business value comes from use, so this is the closest thing to direct evidence that the exchange mattered.
A record missing its input document looks exactly like a complete one.
That is the failure worth designing against. An exchange where the collector caught the answer but not the file that produced it still renders as a tidy record, and nobody discovers the hole until it is the one thing being asked for.
So every record carries a completeness state, and an incomplete one is listed as incomplete: a prompt with no captured reply, an upload the collector saw and could not retain. The gap is on the record rather than in it.
Capture is the easy half.
Everything after capture is where recordkeeping actually lives, and where most AI governance tools stop.
Appraise
Every conversation is assembled into a record with the signals that bear on its value: documents provided, files generated, findings raised, whether the output was used. Those signals produce a proposal, with its reasoning attached.
Sentence
A person decides, against your records authority. The class they choose carries its own disposal action, period and trigger, and the disposal date is computed once, at that moment — so it cannot move later because somebody edited a class.
Hold
A legal hold freezes disposal for an investigation, litigation or an FOI request, and outranks everything else. While one is active the retention sweep is skipped and a subject erasure request is refused — and the refusal is recorded, because declining to erase is a decision that has to be explicable later.
Dispose
Destruction is proposed, authorised by a person, executed, and certified — four steps, because the system may assemble the list but must not approve its own work. The certificate names every record destroyed, its class and its authority, and it is written before anything is deleted.
Transfer
Records sentenced to be kept leave as a package for your EDRMS — the conversation, the input documents, the generated files, a manifest, and hashes to verify all of it. Holding records in Evidarch is not the point. Getting them into the system of record is.
Evidarch never decides to destroy a record.
It will propose retention when something argues for it. It will never propose destruction. Normal administrative practice is a real and useful disposal route, but reaching it automatically would mean destroying records on the strength of "we saw nothing interesting" — which is precisely the reasoning that cannot be defended afterwards.
So the most the system says is that nothing argues for keeping this, and it leaves it for a person. Nothing is ever destroyed from that state. Over-retaining costs storage and is reversible. Destroying a record under a records authority is neither.
The practical consequence is that the queue a records officer works is short: you do not need anyone to approve keeping something, only to approve destroying it.
Built for OpenText Content Manager.
The package loads through Dataport, which every Content Manager site already has — no credentials, no network path, no new attack surface between the two systems.
Metadata that maps
Title, dates, author, record type and the retention schedule the record was sentenced against. A record registered without its schedule cannot be sentenced in Content Manager, which defeats the point of transferring it.
A reconciliation key
Each record carries its conversation identifier as an external reference. Import the record numbers Content Manager assigns back into Evidarch and both systems agree on what has been registered — so "is everything registered?" is a question with an answer.
The files, not just the text
Input documents and generated files travel as unmodified originals, in their own folders alongside the readable transcript of the conversation.
Proof that survives the trip
The package includes the hash of every event in each record and the aggregate over them. Recomputing it shows the record contains exactly what it was built from, without trusting either system.
Three things worth being plain about.
It does not sentence for you. Evidarch ships example retention classes so a new tenant can work on day one, and they are labelled as placeholders. Your agency sentences against its own records authority. Nobody else's codes are yours.
The text is redacted. Secrets, card numbers and email addresses are stripped on the device before capture, so the original wording of a prompt was never held here and cannot be recovered from here. Uploaded and generated files are untouched originals. The transfer package says so on its front page, because a records officer needs to know what they are and are not holding.
Erasure and retention genuinely conflict. A subject can ask you to delete their data while an authority requires you to keep it. Evidarch resolves that in favour of retention when a hold applies, records the refusal, and leaves the judgement where it belongs — with you and your counsel.
Bring your records authority.
The most useful session is with whoever sentences records for your agency. Bring a class or two you actually use, and we will map a captured conversation through appraisal, disposal and transfer against them.