Questions, answered plainly.

AECO.digital is independent research and a methodology — the Responsible-Charge Assessment (RCA) — for producing durable evidence that a licensed professional stayed in responsible charge of AI-assisted work. The tooling that applies it, AECO Shield, is in active development. What’s published today is the methodology and the research behind it.

No. AECO.digital does not place, price, or guarantee insurance coverage, and it is not a broker. It produces evidence a firm and its broker can use — the coverage decision stays entirely with the carrier. The connection to insurance is that professional-liability carriers are increasingly asking how firms use AI, and this is a way to answer with records rather than assurances.

No. This is not a tool-rating service, and it does not declare any AI tool “safe” or “approved.” Whether a tool is fit for a given task is the licensed professional’s judgment. The methodology records that a professional exercised responsible charge over AI-assisted work — it does not judge the tool.

Responsible charge (responsible control, for architects) is a licensed professional’s non-delegable duty to direct and control the work they seal — not merely review it after the fact. AI doesn’t change the duty, but it makes it harder to demonstrate: when a tool drafts, checks, or generates work, the vendor’s disclaimer hands responsibility back to the professional, and there’s no standard way to show the professional stayed in charge. RCA is a way to record that they did.

No — and it’s built specifically not to. The record documents that a professional set criteria, verified the work, and adopted it; it says nothing about whether the engineering judgment was right. That boundary is deliberate: a method that judged the engineering would take on the engineering’s liability. The judgment stays yours.

No — it documents what you did, which is different. A complete record shows the direction, verification, and adoption that responsible charge involves; whether that amounted to responsible charge in a given case is a determination for a licensing board or a court, not for the methodology. The record is evidence, not a verdict — that honesty is the point.

A checklist or a policy is a claim — “we have a process.” The record is evidence of what actually happened on a specific sealed deliverable: who was accountable, what AI touched it, what was verified and by what method, recorded as the work was done rather than reconstructed later. A policy says what a firm intends; the record documents what it did.

For the licensed professionals who put their seal on work AI helped produce — professional engineers, licensed architects, and land surveyors — and for the firms carrying the professional-liability exposure behind them. If a licensed professional is accountable for AI-assisted sealed work, the methodology is built to document that accountability.

The aim is the opposite — to capture responsible-charge evidence as a byproduct of the work you already do, not to add a parallel process. The methodology follows the natural sequence of a deliverable: define the task, qualify the tool, direct the work, verify it, seal it. The record is what that sequence leaves behind.

Yes. Independent verification doesn’t require a large team — for a sole practitioner, a check separated in time and performed by a different method, a retained external reviewer, or an authority-having-jurisdiction plan review can each provide it. The methodology is explicit that the small-firm case is a first-class path, not an afterthought.

No. The research and tooling never train on a firm’s data. Project context stays in that firm’s own environment; nothing a firm records becomes an input to anyone else’s analysis. A record built to prove accountability cannot quietly become a source of leverage over the people who kept it.

AECO.digital is in research and preview — the methodology is published and the research is free to read, but there’s nothing to buy and no account to create today. The methodology is authored by a practicing professional engineer holding PhD, PE, PMP, and IWE credentials, who seals work under the same responsible-charge rules it documents. You can read about the author and the research, or register interest to follow the work.