Concepts

The Principal

The human review surface that turns AI-drafted advice into accountable, signed decisions.

Bedrock's name comes from the legal idea of a principal — the person legally responsible for an act, regardless of who or what carried it out. In an AI-assisted advice firm, the principal is the human reviewer who reads the AI's draft, takes responsibility for it, and approves, modifies or rejects it. The Principal app is where they do that work.

What the Principal app does

  • Receives jobs submitted via the API.
  • Routes them to qualified reviewers based on skill, vulnerability triggers, SLA, and load.
  • Captures every interaction the reviewer has with the document — opens, scrolls, time on page, checklist ticks, notes, modifications.
  • Gates submission of the decision behind any required checklist items.
  • Writes the decision into the ledger and triggers certificate issuance.

Why the activity capture is the point

FCA Consumer Duty doesn't just ask whether the right outcome was reached. It asks whether you can show that a competent human exercised meaningful judgement. Bedrock's answer is to record exactly what the reviewer did: which sections they read, how long they spent, which checklist items they ticked, what notes they wrote, what they modified. The activity log becomes part of the ledger entry and the certificate.

This is the difference between an audit trail that says “reviewer X approved at 14:32” and one that says “reviewer X opened the document, read all six sections in sequence, spent 38 seconds on the risk profile section, ticked all four mandatory checklist items, added a note flagging the client's recently disclosed vulnerability, and then approved at 14:32.” The second one survives a regulator visit; the first does not.

How jobs flow through Principal

  1. Submitted — your back-office system POSTs the job to the API.
  2. Queued — Bedrock evaluates routing rules.
  3. Assigned — a reviewer is chosen and notified.
  4. In review — the reviewer opens the document; their activity is recorded.
  5. Decided — approve, modify, or reject. The decision and the activity log are signed and committed.
  6. Certificate issued — Bedrock generates and signs the customer-facing certificate.

Reviewer qualifications

Reviewers carry credentials (CFA, CFP, DipPFS, CISI, IMC) that the routing engine uses to match jobs to qualified humans. Vulnerable-customer cases route only to reviewers with the relevant training. See Vulnerability routing.

See also