How do I answer a client's security questionnaire about our AI work records?
Answer each question by pointing at the record that evidences it: access questions at the access inventory, recording questions at a sample job record, verification questions at the public check route, retention questions at the schedule. Review the receipt and actual deliverable before accepting a handover.
Scope: answer only what is true of your practice today. Never claim a certification, audit, or control your practice does not hold; a questionnaire answered honestly, with gaps named and dated plans attached, outperforms one answered aspirationally, and only one of those survives the follow-up evidence request.
Security questionnaires about AI work are converging on a stable set of concerns: what can the agents reach, what is recorded when they act, who can check the records, how long records live, and what happens on an incident. A practice running the systems in this file already holds an artefact for each: the access inventory, the job record, the verify route, the retention schedule, and the incident template. The questionnaire stops being a writing task and becomes a mapping task.
The mapping discipline is one answer, one artefact. Where the questionnaire asks how AI work is recorded, attach a real (suitably scoped) job record and the verify link, and let the reviewer run the check during their review; a control the reviewer has personally exercised needs no further adjectives. Where the question asks about data handling, answer with the customer-data setup: references rather than copies, gated change classes, and the inventory review cadence, each named with its artefact.
The gaps section is where questionnaires are won or quietly lost. Every practice has gaps against a thorough questionnaire; the ones that close deals name theirs, with the remediation and its date, in the answer itself. Reviewers are calibrated to detect aspiration, and a named gap with a date reads as a control environment, while a wall of unqualified yes reads as a form filled by hope.
Template: the questionnaire answer map
Question class, Access and authentication: answer with the access inventory (agents, scopes, owners, review dates), excerpted for the client. Question class, Recording and audit trail: answer with one sample job record plus the verify route, and the recording rule in one sentence. Question class, Data handling: answer with the customer-data setup summary (references not copies, gates, minimisation). Question class, Retention and deletion: answer with the schedule, per class, with dates. Question class, Incidents: answer with the incident record template and the notification order. Closing section, Known gaps: each gap, its remediation, its date. Rule: no answer ships without its artefact named.
Worked example
The recording answer's artefact, in public form: https://zambo.dev/handover/45434a17-4afc-486a-9646-e689bcee4297 plus https://zambo.dev/verify/ , a record and the route to check it. A reviewer who clicks both has verified your central claim personally, which no paragraph about your commitment to transparency has ever achieved.
Frequently asked questions
The questionnaire asks about certifications we do not hold. What do we write?
Write that you do not hold them, state what you do hold and do, and attach the artefacts. The scope line on this page is absolute: a claimed certification that does not exist is not a gap, it is a misrepresentation, and it converts a winnable review into a disqualifying discovery.
Should we share our full access inventory with a client?
Share the excerpt that concerns their work: the agents and scopes touching their account, with owners and review dates. The full inventory is an internal security document; the excerpt is the client's legitimate evidence, and offering it unprompted signals exactly the maturity the questionnaire tests.
How long should a questionnaire take with this method?
Hours, not weeks, once the artefacts exist, because nearly every answer is a mapping. If a questionnaire takes weeks, the weeks are being spent building the controls the answers describe, which is the questionnaire doing its job.
By Brennan Zambo, founder of Zambo.
Last verified: 2026-10-17.
Try a handover
A handover gives your client one proof link with verifiable receipts to review, then Accept or Flag.
try it: say 'use zambo to hand this over to <client>' in your ai