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AI fluency
What should I hand off to AI, and what should I keep?
Hand off the tasks that are low-stakes, easy to check, or describable from rules you have written down. Keep the ones where a wrong answer is expensive, the judgment is yours, or you could not tell whether the output was wrong. The tasks in the middle get a draft-and-review step, not a straight handoff.
One question sorts most tasks.
Before you hand anything to an AI, ask: if it got this wrong, would I notice before it mattered? If yes, delegate freely.
If no, either keep the task or put a review step between the AI and the world. That single question sorts more work correctly than any list of use cases, because it is about your ability to catch errors, not about what the tool can technically do.
Three kinds of task to hand off today.
- Low-stakes drafts. A reply, a product description, a first draft of a post. You read it before it goes out, so a mistake costs a quick edit, not a customer.
- Checkable grunt work. Turning 50 receipts into a table, pulling figures out of a PDF, reformatting a list. The output is right in front of you and easy to spot-check against the source.
- Work you can ground in written rules. Anything the AI can do by reading your knowledge base (your policy, your prices, your specs) instead of guessing from training data.
Three kinds of task to keep.
- Expensive-if-wrong, hard-to-spot. Final pricing, a tax position, a compliance claim. The error hides until it is costly.
- Judgment that is the job. Who to hire, whether to take the client, how to handle the upset regular. You can think out loud with AI, but the call is yours.
- Things you could not check. If you cannot tell whether the answer is right, you cannot delegate it. You can only gamble on it.
The trap in the middle: draft, then review.
Most real tasks are not clearly safe or clearly off-limits. Customer emails, quotes, marketplace replies: valuable to speed up, expensive to get wrong.
These are not a straight handoff and they are not keep-it-all-yourself either. They are draft-and-review: the AI prepares, grounded in your files and citing its sources, and you approve before anything sends. That is the whole method behind answering customer emails without making things up.
Go deeper: delegation is really three decisions, the problem, the platform, and the handoff.
Delegation is one of four skills in the AI Fluency Framework (Dakan, Feller, and Anthropic, CC BY-NC-SA), which we adapt in our guide to AI fluency for owner-operators. The examples here are our own.
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