Treat AI like a new hire
If AI is so smart, why is it so dumb?
You’ve heard about AI solving hard mathematics problems, and you might have vibe coded an app without encountering an error. So you must be wondering why most of what AI seems to be doing in workplaces is summarising information. If it’s so smart, why isn’t it more useful?
It’s probably because smart doesn’t mean reliable. It can also be because by the time you explain what you want, and everything involved in that, you might as well have done it yourself. Both of these can be caused by your AI not living where your work gets done.
Is delegation the real problem?
If you’ve got someone who is a productivity bottleneck, doing many things that could have been delegated, there’s no use just telling them to delegate more. Instead, you need to make it easy for them to hand on the task to someone else, and do it in a way that they get notified when it is done, with a chance to review their work. And to really make delegating worthwhile, that task needs to be already bundled with everything needed to get it done.
Whether you’re delegating work to another person or an AI, you need these same things. And if you want to hand on work to either a person or AI, they must be working in the same workspace. You don’t want to have to open up your AI Chat website, paste in a lot of context, write out the instructions, and then keep checking in on it until it is done.
Instead, you want to be in the task in your to-do list, click on “New sub-task”, give a brief instruction for what you want done, and assign it to a person or an AI agent. Then move on to your next task. Once that task's been done, you see it pop up in your list of things to review. The AI was able to complete it correctly because all of the context it needed was linked to the parent task, the project, the business the project is for, and all of the files that support it. Mark the task completed, and instantly the task that contained it re-appears in your to-do list.
AI in your workflow
Projects are the natural way to collect tasks together. And usually one task needs to get done before the next. Sometimes a task can kick off a few tasks, or depend on a few things being done first. So any good workflow connects tasks together. Tasks don’t get done unless they’re assigned to someone. To easily integrate AI into your workflow, you need to be able to select the AI agent in the same place as you’d assign a staff member.
The Complete Business Management Suite does exactly this. You can lay out your whole workflow with staff or AI assigned and, where useful, also assign a reviewer. This makes it easy for each task to hand off to the next, while ensuring everything critical gets reviewed before the next task starts. And because the AI has its own computer, it can do a wide range of very productive work.
Managing AI like a staff member
You don’t give all of your staff access to everything. Some are able to log in to software and websites, while other staff are only allowed to see just enough to get their work done. And you need to know what your staff have been doing, what changes they’ve made, and what they’ve created. It’s often good to know how long it took them, and how much that cost you.
To make the most of AI in your workplace, you need to be able to trust it like staff. This means only giving access to software, websites, and internal information when it is required to get specific work done. You need to be able to see what an AI has done, edited, and created. And you need to know what that work cost to get done.
Because the Complete Business Management Suite is built on Notion, you have all of these capabilities built in. This makes it possible to manage AI in the same way, and even in the same workspace, as your staff.
Expand as reliability is proven
As with a new hire, trusting and delegating more work to AI should be a gradual process. If the outcome could be better, be clear about what needs changing, and ask it to update its skills. Unlike a good staff member, AI will start by making some mistakes that common sense would have prevented. But unlike most staff members, once you’ve corrected the issue with AI, it reliably works that way and never forgets. As trust grows you’ll find yourself removing the reviewer from more of the AI’s tasks. AI will continue to power through long and complex workflows. And you’ll get better at knowing exactly where human taste and judgement are required.