Find the friction
Begin with an honest workflow map.
Useful products are rooted in the details: repeated handoffs, slow research, fragmented information, and decisions delayed because the right context is hard to assemble.
STIPDOT / Field note / AI & work
The best AI gives people more room to do the work only they can do.
The point of workplace AI is not to make people busier. It is to reduce avoidable coordination and give expertise, care, and judgment more room to matter.
Respect expertise
Augmentation is a design choice.
A good system makes an expert faster without hiding their judgment. It preserves context, explains its contribution, and makes correction easy.
Measure more than time saved
Quality matters.
The most meaningful outcomes may be faster access, fewer errors, greater consistency, more time with customers, or decisions made with better information.
Investor question
Who becomes more capable?
We are interested in products whose beneficiaries can name the capability they gain, not just the tasks they no longer perform.
Apply the idea
A practical test: the handoff after a meeting.
A meeting assistant can generate a fluent summary while leaving coordination unchanged. Test whether the right person receives a clear action, whether the deadline is accurate, and whether participants can correct the record. Compare the entire follow-up process with the existing approach. Include the time needed to check the transcript and repair mistakes. Let people decide which actions become commitments. The useful outcome is not a longer record of the meeting; it is shared understanding and less effort to move the work forward.
The agent is not the product. The completed work is. ↗
The most useful way to assess an AI agent is not by how autonomously it appears to reason, but by whether it can own a valuable piece of work safely and repeatably.
Field note / AIGCGenerative AI should elevate taste, not erase it. ↗
AIGC creates an abundance of first drafts. Its lasting value will be measured by whether people can use that abundance to make better choices and more original work.
Field note / TrustResponsible AI is the operating system for scale. ↗
As an AI product moves from a small group of enthusiastic users to consequential use, trust becomes an engineering, product, and leadership discipline.
Field note / AI & lifeA better future is one where intelligence is more widely available. ↗
AI can make daily life more dignified when it helps people understand complex systems, access services, learn new skills, and maintain more time for one another.
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Questions to take into a product review.
Start with the investor question: Who becomes more capable?
Workload
Does the tool remove effort from the whole team or transfer checking and coordination to someone else?
Expertise
Can the practitioner see and correct the system’s contribution before it becomes a decision or commitment?
Quality
Which errors, delays, or missed handoffs should decrease, and how will the team observe that change?