Incident response, the kill switch, and downstream consequence management
When a deployed AI system starts causing harm, the quality of the response depends almost entirely on what was prepared before the incident. This topic is that preparation.
Why this matters for the AIGP exam
Incident scenarios test sequence — what a governance professional does first, next and after — and the exam rewards the procedural answer over the heroic one.
The essentials
- Define "incident" in advance. Discriminatory outputs, harmful advice, data leakage through a model, drift past thresholds, misuse — teams that have not defined AI incidents do not recognise them until they are public.
- The sequence is contain, assess, notify, remediate. Stop ongoing harm first (suspend the system or feature), then establish scope and cause, then meet notification duties — internal escalation, affected users, regulators where required — then fix and verify.
- The kill switch is a designed capability, not a metaphor: a tested, authorised way to halt the system or roll back to a prior version quickly. Whether it exists is decided at deployment, not during the incident.
- Downstream consequences are part of the incident: decisions already made on bad outputs may need unwinding — refunds, re-decisions, corrections — and the plan should say who finds them.
- Close the loop. Post-incident review feeds monitoring thresholds, testing and policy; an incident that changes nothing will repeat.
What the exam asks
Order the response steps for a described incident, and identify the missing preparation — usually the definition, the kill switch, or the notification path.
Going deeper
This page is the condensed version. The full topic — with the detail above expanded and practice questions attached — is in the app, inside Domain IV. Domain I, a quarter of the course, is free to try first.
Back to the AIGP study guide.
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