AI Tools Inventory
Type: control artefact First seen: 2026-03-18 Last updated: 2026-05-17
Definition
A tagged, owner-mapped register of all AI tools and systems in use within an organisation, with stakeholder mapping per tool. The emerging baseline evidence artefact for both supervisory and AI Act obligations [S-2025-11-19-bcbs-othp90].
Origin
Named explicitly as a step in the BCBS ten-step playbook (step 4: AI tools inventory; step 5: stakeholder mapping) [S-2025-11-19-bcbs-othp90]. Parallel emergence in EU AI Act Annex IV documentation requirements for high-risk systems.
How it connects to other concepts
- part-of → BCBS AI Governance Framework — Step 4 of the ten-step playbook.
- depends-on → Model Risk Management and Agentic AI — model inventory is the parent concept; AI tools inventory extends it.
- depends-on → BCBS 239 and Data Lineage — data lineage of training and inference data is a related substrate.
- relates-to → EU AI Act — Annex IV technical documentation.
- relates-to → Three Lines of Defence for AI — 1LoD-owned, 2LoD-validated.
Practical applications
ECB position (echoed in practitioner commentary): institutions should maintain catalogues of all AI and ML models — internal models and generative AI tools — supervised by the CRO under Three Lines of Defence for AI.
AI Assurance Pathway artefacts that operationalise the inventory [S-2026-05-06-paul-ai-data-pathway]:
- AI System Inventory template.
- AI Use-Case Intake Form.
- Tool Registry & Approval Workflow.
- Model Validation Report (mappable to AI Act Annex IV).
- AI Logging & Evidence Specification (Art 12).
- Drift Monitoring Plan.
- AI Vendor DDQ.
As an opening intervention, the inventory is often the single highest-leverage control to deliver in early engagements because it surfaces shadow AI, vendor concentration, and 2LoD coverage gaps simultaneously.
Tensions / variants
- Scope variants: model-only inventory vs. extended inventory covering foundation models + prompt sets + agent tool registries + retrieval corpora. The wider scope is needed for agentic AI but is not yet uniformly required by supervisors.
- Ownership variants: inventory under CDO (operational ownership) vs. CRO (risk ownership) — see Model Risk Management and Agentic AI Tensions.
Sources
- [[