Everyone's racing to hand AI agents the decisions. That's exactly the wrong...

Everyone's racing to hand AI agents the decisions. That's exactly the wrong thing to automate. (Give me two minutes.)

The whole pitch right now is autonomy: hand the agent your approvals, your judgment calls, the "it depends" moments, and let it run the shop while you sleep. That's the part I'd tell you to keep your hands on the longest. Not forever. But a lot longer than the demo wants you to.

Here's the test I actually use. Call it the two-column test. Draw two columns.

Left column is friction: the repeatable, clearly-owned, low-risk handoffs. The form that needs to reach the right person. The file that needs to move to the right folder. The reminder nobody remembers to send. The approval that just needs a consistent paper trail. Automate all of it, freely. That's what the machines are for.

Right column is judgment: the real decisions, the context calls, the honest "it depends." That's the stuff the flashy demos love to show off. It's also the stuff that quietly wrecks something at 2am, when the agent guessed wrong and nobody was watching.

Yes, you can put a human in the loop. Most people don't. They set it up once, watch it work twice, and quietly stop watching. A guardrail that only holds when someone's paying attention isn't a guardrail.

And here's the line I expect some of you to fight me on: the more impressive an automation looks in the demo, the better the odds it's automating judgment you'll wish you'd kept. The boring handoff nobody bothers to film is usually the one that actually pays.

(Most of what people call an "automation problem" is really an unclear-ownership problem. A workflow will expose that in about a week. It won't resolve it for you.)

So if you can't tell which column a task belongs in, that's your answer. It's not ready to automate. It's ready to be clarified.

Start on the left. One boring handoff, one result you can measure (hours saved, errors dropped, a turnaround time you can point to). Then make the agent earn its way over to the right column. Most of them never should.

What's the judgment call you'd actually hand an agent tomorrow? Tell me, and I'll tell you whether I'd sign off on it.