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What is an Efficacy Assessment?

An Efficacy Assessment is a qualitative evaluation of how effectively your AI system performs its intended purpose. It focuses on whether the system delivers outputs that are useful, relevant, and aligned with the defined use case.

An AI system that is safe but ineffective still creates business and governance risk. It wastes resources, erodes confidence in AI-driven processes, and can lead to poor decision-making. Our Efficacy Assessment helps you verify that your AI systems are actually delivering real value.

Why efficacy matters

Organizations invest in AI systems to solve specific problems - whether that is automating a process, improving decision-making, or enhancing a product. If the system is not performing well against those goals, it is not just a technology issue. It is a governance issue.

An ineffective system might produce inconsistent results, miss important patterns, or generate outputs that do not align with what was expected. Our Efficacy Assessment helps you catch these issues and make informed decisions about whether a system is ready for deployment, needs improvement, or should be retired.

What we evaluate

Our Efficacy Assessment looks at your system's performance from multiple angles:

  • Whether the system's outputs match its documented intended use and purpose
  • How tasks and workflows execute and whether results are consistent
  • Whether outputs are relevant, complete, and accurate for the defined use case
  • Whether there is proper alignment between inputs, processing logic, and outputs

The assessment applies qualitative criteria to determine whether the system meaningfully satisfies its objectives - not just whether it produces technically correct responses, but whether those responses actually solve the problem it was built to solve.

How efficacy connects to governance

Efficacy is one of the six risk dimensions we evaluate during Risk Mapping. The Efficacy Assessment provides a deeper, focused review of system performance. Results support governance decisions related to whether an AI system should be approved for deployment, scaled further, or reconsidered.

Efficacy results also feed into our workflow and reporting capabilities, giving stakeholders a clear view of whether each AI system in the inventory is performing as expected.

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