Automate/Augment/Keep — The Process Mapping Framework

The questions that make the call

1. 1Do I need to verify the output regardless of who generates it?▾

   If you'd check the work no matter who did it, delegating costs you nothing new. If checking means redoing it, don't hand it off.

   Your dishwasher dies on a Sunday.

   Find 10 local plumbers and submit each contact form so quotes start coming in

   You'll hear directly from every plumber on timing and price either way. Who made the first contact doesn't matter.

   Automate

   Upload the policy and ask which page the water-damage language is on

   Now the answer is a pointer you can check in ten seconds. Caution: it can find the clause and miss the exclusion two pages later.

   Augment

   Ask whether your homeowner's policy covers the water damage

   Whatever it says, you're reading the policy yourself before you file the claim.

   Keep
2. 2Is this step creating something or deciding something?▾

   AI is at its best creating and at its worst choosing. Let it draft the options; the decision stays yours.

   Two things on this week's list.

   The family reunion email you've put off for three weeks

   AI drafts it in a minute. You fix Aunt Carol's name and send it.

   Augment

   Picking which contractor rebuilds the deck

   Have AI line up the three quotes item by item and flag what the cheap one left out. Then you pick, because you live with the deck and the person building it.

   Keep
3. 3What happens if it's wrong once?▾

   Some AI outputs have room to fail; the stakes are low enough. Others aren't worth the risk.

   Hiring a student intern, with AI in every seat but one.

   AI drafts the interview questions and the scorecard

   Sharper questions than you'd write at 11pm the night before, and every candidate gets measured against the same bar. If one question lands flat, you feel it live and skip it. A cheap miss.

   Augment

   AI analyzes the interview transcripts against the scorecard

   It catches the quote you'd forgotten and scores all ten interviews with the same consistency. A missed nuance here still gets caught, because you were in the room.

   Augment

   AI makes the hire

   A transcript can't carry body language, tone, or how someone handled the question they didn't expect. Get the hire wrong once and you spend a semester managing the miss, which is why AI sets the table and a person makes the call.

   Keep
4. 4Does it need context the AI can't see?▾

   It only knows what you've shown it. Supply the missing context, or keep the step.

   Same request, two ways.

   “Plan a week of dinners”

   A lovely plan for someone else's family.

   Keep

   Add the onion rule, the twenty-minute Tuesday, and the budget

   The plan gets genuinely good. The AI couldn't see your kitchen until you showed it.

   Automate
5. 5Could I have done this step myself?▾

   You can only catch mistakes in work you could have done yourself. If the step is beyond you, so is reviewing it.

   AI writes the Python script that cleans your survey data, and it's good.

   You read code

   You skim it, catch that it drops rows with blank emails, and fix one line. AI just saved you an afternoon.

   Augment

   You don't

   The script runs without errors and looks done, and you can't see what it quietly excluded. Have someone who codes glance at it, or ask for the row counts before and after and check those instead.

   Keep
6. 6Have I tried it on this exact step?▾

   AI is great at some tasks and useless at others that look identical. The only way to know which is which is to try it.

   Both feel like “plan my trip.”

   The Rome itinerary

   Trains, neighborhoods, the restaurant two streets from the Pantheon. Rome is documented to death, and it nails it.

   Automate

   The national park trip

   It invents a trailhead and a shuttle that doesn't exist, because backcountry conditions aren't documented. Test each new kind of task on ground you can check.

   Augment