ADCO AI LLC

Quality Policy

Complete policy text. Original document: 4 pages.

ADCO builds quality into the way work is defined, assigned, reviewed, corrected, and delivered. Our objective is to provide human judgment that clients can understand, evaluate, and rely on within the agreed purpose of each engagement.

01 Purpose and scope

This Policy establishes quality requirements for ADCO AI LLC and any subsidiary or affiliated entity participating in the relevant ADCO activity, collectively ADCO. It applies to personnel and approved external providers performing managed human services for AI, including annotation, evaluation, verification, research, multilingual review, and human oversight, and to staff augmentation within ADCO's agreed responsibilities.

Project agreements define the deliverables, responsibilities, acceptance criteria, and remedies for each engagement. This Policy supports those agreements and applicable legal, security, privacy, and ethical requirements. Project arrangements must identify any justified variation from a policy baseline before the affected work begins; commercial pressure does not authorize informal exceptions.

02 Accountability for quality

Leadership is responsible for providing appropriate people, tools, time, and oversight. Each managed engagement must have an accountable delivery owner, a designated quality function, and authorized release responsibility. These responsibilities must be clear even when a small team performs several functions.

Technical reviewers assess correctness and unresolved uncertainty. Operations management confirms completeness, readiness, and required documentation. Authorized ADCO leadership or the designated release owner approves external delivery, with client approval where required. A person assessing disputed or consequential work must have sufficient independence to challenge production decisions. Sales targets and deadlines must not override a failed quality or safety gate.

03 Agreeing the work and its acceptance criteria

Before production, the project owner must document the intended use, task boundaries, unit of work, source requirements, language or specialist needs, output format, delivery schedule, approved tools, and client dependencies. The quality plan must specify measurable objectives, defect severity, review coverage, escalation routes, and the evidence required for acceptance.

Unless the statement of work or service-level agreement establishes another standard, ADCO's baseline quality objective is at least 95% against a defensible reference answer or adjudicated result. This is a project objective, not a representation of historical performance or a guarantee for every item. Critical failures remain subject to release restrictions regardless of an aggregate score.

04 Instructions, qualification, and calibration

Personnel must receive current task instructions, clear examples, relevant exclusions, and guidance on when to stop and ask for clarification. Instructions and material amendments must have identifiable versions so that a reviewer can establish which rules applied to a particular batch.

Assignment requires demonstrated competence appropriate to the language, subject matter, tools, and risk of the task. Qualification should assess actual reasoning and task performance. Before scaling, the team must complete a controlled pilot, compare decisions, resolve recurring ambiguity, and document the interpretation adopted. Failed qualification requires coaching, reassessment, or reassignment before unrestricted production work.

05 Reference integrity and human judgment

Reference answers and benchmark examples must be checked for relevance, validity, and consistency with current instructions. Where evaluation depends on a protected test set, access and handling must prevent answer leakage, unauthorized sharing, or contamination of training and production materials. Suspected contamination must be investigated before results are relied upon.

Subjective evaluations may have several defensible outcomes. Reviewer agreement must not be presented as proof of factual correctness. Disagreements should be classified, discussed against the rubric, and referred to an authorized adjudicator when material. Reviewers must record uncertainty honestly and must not invent a source, rationale, citation, or client instruction to force a decision.

06 Review coverage appropriate to risk

ADCO's baseline requires full review of the initial pilot for new projects, personnel, or materially revised instructions until calibration is stable. Stable, standard-risk production starts with a 20% sample; a reduction to 10% requires documented stability and no critical defects. Subjective or ambiguous work receives at least a 20% sample, with selected double review or consensus and adjudication of unresolved items.

High-risk, privacy-sensitive, safety-sensitive, or client-critical output requires full review and quality approval before release. Repeated failures or material changes in instructions, personnel, or systems increase review to 50–100% until corrective action is verified. A project-specific alternative requires documented justification and the applicable client agreement; it must preserve mandatory safeguards.

07 Meaningful measurement and sampling

The quality plan must explain how samples are selected and which population they represent. Selection should cover relevant batches, contributors, task types, and known risk areas without choosing only easy or successful examples. A percentage alone does not establish statistical confidence; sample size, selection bias, rare failures, and the consequences of error must inform review decisions.

Depending on the work, measures may address correctness, first-pass acceptance, disagreement, rework, escaped defects, timeliness, and unresolved escalations. Reports must distinguish initial performance from corrected results, identify denominators and exclusions, and describe material limitations. Output volume must not be substituted for accepted quality.

08 Language, accessibility, and harmful bias

Evaluation must reflect the intended audience, context, and use. Teams should identify when dialect, cultural assumptions, disability, incomplete source information, or underrepresented cases can affect a judgment. Relevant language or subject expertise must be available before work is represented as qualified specialist review.

Where relevant and lawfully supported by available data, the quality plan should examine whether particular groups or task categories experience materially different error patterns. Reviewers must flag discriminatory instructions, unsupported stereotypes, and accessibility barriers. Client clarification and specialist review should resolve material concerns before affected outputs are approved.

09 Controlled production and responsible tools

Work must remain attributable to authorized personnel and the relevant task, batch, and instruction version. Teams must use approved accounts, systems, references, and access permissions. Records should be sufficient to investigate a result without collecting unnecessary personal information or making uncontrolled copies of client material.

Automation and AI assistance require project authorization and suitable validation. Personnel must not place client data in public AI tools or unapproved applications. AI-generated judgments, synthetic content, and automated checks must not be passed off as independent human work. The agreed human review must remain meaningful when tools assist production.

10 Defects, escalation, and containment

A critical defect includes unauthorized disclosure, prohibited release, misuse of client information, or a materially wrong outcome carrying significant safety or other project-defined consequences. It requires the affected release to stop, containment of the relevant scope, and full review of that scope. Security or privacy concerns must also enter the applicable incident response process.

Major defects materially impair the intended result and must be corrected before delivery. Recurring major failures require expanded review and recalibration. Minor defects concern lower-impact presentation or metadata issues and must be addressed according to acceptance requirements and tracked for recurrence. Personnel must escalate uncertainty rather than silently guess or conceal errors.

11 Correction, change control, and release

Rejected or quarantined work must be separated from approved output. The team must identify the affected batches, correct confirmed errors, and recheck the relevant scope before resubmission. Original decisions and subsequent changes should remain traceable where required, with an explanation of any material correction.

A release requires the agreed checks, resolved blocking issues, correct format and version, authorized destination, and recorded approval. Material changes to scope, tools, instructions, personnel, or acceptance rules require an impact assessment, appropriate authorization, and renewed calibration or review. Acceptance thresholds must not be changed retrospectively to conceal a failed result.

12 Staff augmentation and external providers

For staff augmentation, the engagement must allocate responsibility for task instructions, supervision, quality review, system access, and final acceptance. Where the client directs the workflow, ADCO supports agreed qualification, personnel management, escalation, and performance obligations; responsibility for client-controlled decisions remains as stated in the agreement.

Approved external providers must meet relevant competence, confidentiality, privacy, security, and conduct requirements. Their outputs remain subject to the applicable project controls. Subcontracting must not conceal who performed the work or bypass a required client approval, location restriction, review step, or release decision.

13 Sustainable work and professional development

Quality depends on people having sufficient preparation, attention, and support. Workload and productivity expectations must allow required checks, clarification, breaks, and lawful working hours. Personnel must not be pressured into unpaid work, false time records, unsafe speed, or fatigue that compromises judgment.

Coaching should explain the cause of an error and the action needed to improve. Reviewers may raise workload, unclear-instruction, safety, or quality concerns in good faith without retaliation. Work involving distressing content requires suitable preparation, escalation, and workload adjustments consistent with ADCO's worker-protection standards.

14 Client reporting and continual improvement

Client reports must accurately describe the scope, review method, results, open issues, and material limitations relevant to acceptance. ADCO must communicate confirmed delivery problems through the agreed contact and escalation arrangements, including the affected work and proposed correction where known. Demonstration results and internal exercises must be identified accurately.

Complaints, recurring defects, rework, and missed commitments must be assessed for underlying causes. Corrective actions must have an owner and proportionate completion criteria; effectiveness must be checked before closure. Leadership reviews material trends and recurring control failures and directs improvements to staffing, training, instructions, tools, or project design.

15 Policy administration and contact

Relevant personnel must understand this Policy and the project procedures that apply to their work. Quality records must be protected and retained under the applicable agreement and retention requirements. ADCO reviews these standards when operating experience, material risk, client requirements, or legal obligations justify changes.

Quality and delivery questions may be submitted through the contact form at www.adcohq.com/contact or to the designated engagement contact. Privacy matters should be directed to privacy@adcohq.com. Assurance statements, audit descriptions, and certification claims must be supported by evidence appropriate to their scope.