Where AI belongs in a small team's workflow
AI is a multiplier on defined work, not a replacement for deciding. A practical map of the tasks it should take, the ones it should draft, and the one tier it must never own.
Founder & Creative Director
Key takeaways
- Give AI the bounded, verifiable work; keep judgement and taste human.
- Drafts beat answers: AI writes the first pass, a person owns the last.
- Every AI step needs a human gate before anything ships, sends or spends.
The three tiers
The useful question is not whether to use AI but where. We sort every task into three tiers. Tier one is mechanical and verifiable: formatting, extracting, routing, summarising known sources. Hand it over entirely.
Tier two is first-pass work: drafts of descriptions, replies, outlines. AI writes the beginning, a person owns the ending — the draft is never the deliverable. Tier three is judgement: pricing, positioning, what to promise a client. That stays human, because taste and accountability do not delegate.
The gate rule
Anything that ships, sends or spends passes a human review first. No exceptions, no matter how confident the output looks — fluency is not correctness, and the model has no reputation to lose. Yours does.
The gate works when it is built in: approval steps live inside the workflow, in a dashboard, not in an inbox someone will eventually skim.
Measure it like the work it replaces
An AI step earns its place the way any employee does: hours returned, error rate, turnaround time. If nobody can name the number it improved, it was a toy — retire it and keep the workflow simple.
The teams that get value from AI are not the ones using it everywhere. They are the ones that can say exactly what it took off their plate this week.
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