About Boundsmap

Behind every AI product is a chain of people and companies: someone gathered data and trained a model, or chose an API and wrote a prompt; someone built it into a product; someone put it to work on a real decision. When something goes wrong, the person on the receiving end rarely knows any of them.

Interesting questions lie in the gaps between the parties in this AI supply chain. Where one party hands something to the next and has to be trusted about it, who is accountable for what? Usually nobody has written it down, and the small company in the middle, the one that added an AI feature to a product it already sold, often finds out only when a customer asks.

I’m Iain Barclay, an engineer, and I’m fascinated by the human side of the AI stack. Boundsmap grew out of my research. The framework it uses, the Roles & Boundaries Framework, began in my PhD research at Cardiff University. I tested it by putting it in front of practitioners from industry, government and academia. Boundsmap turns the framework into a tool: describe your system in plain words, see who sits where, and see what they are accountable for at each handover.

We are not providing legal advice, and Boundsmap does not replace an adviser. What it offers is a clear, checkable map of your own position, so that you can have the conversation with your team, your suppliers, your customers and a lawyer. Where the law has not decided, it says so.

You can read where the framework comes from in the guide to the framework.