What is a Transparency Assessment?

A Transparency Assessment is a qualitative evaluation of how understandable and explainable your AI system is to the people who rely on it. It looks at whether your system's purpose, behavior, and outputs can be clearly explained and traced.

Transparency is a core requirement in AI governance. Systems that cannot be explained or understood increase compliance risk, erode trust, and make it difficult for stakeholders to make informed decisions about them.

Why transparency matters

Regulators, auditors, business leaders, and end users all need different levels of understanding about how an AI system works. A hiring manager needs to explain why a candidate was ranked a certain way. A compliance officer needs to trace how a decision was made. An auditor needs to verify that the right processes were followed.

Without transparency, none of this is possible. Our Transparency Assessment helps you evaluate whether your system provides the level of clarity and traceability that your stakeholders require.

What we evaluate

Our Transparency Assessment uses structured questions to evaluate your system across several key areas:

• Documentation - Whether the system has sufficient documentation about its purpose, design, and behavior
• Explainability - Whether the system's decision-making process can be understood and communicated to different audiences
• Traceability - Whether you can follow the path from inputs through processing to outputs across tasks, agents, and workflows
• Auditability - Whether the information available is enough for governance, compliance, and operational review

The assessment is organized into sections including Design, Communication, Challenge, Additional Information, and Third Party considerations.

How we assess transparency

The Transparency Assessment is a qualitative process. Your team answers structured questions about the system, covering topics like:

• Whether end users are informed they are interacting with an AI system
• Whether there are mechanisms for users to challenge the system's decisions
• Whether system owners have been formally appointed and recorded
• Whether template responses exist for common user inquiries
• Whether there is a target response time when users challenge a decision
• Whether decisions made by the system can be revised

These questions are designed to surface gaps in how your organization communicates about and provides oversight of the AI system.