AI as an operating layer

The AI gap I’m paying attention to is between people using it as an assistant and people using it to change how work is structured.

Writing an email, summarizing a call, or cleaning up a document can save time. But AI is also starting to sit between messy inputs, business context, decision rules, tools, review steps, and final outputs. Designing that flow takes a different skill set.

Someone needs to decide where the model should reason, where it shouldn’t be trusted, and where a human needs to approve. They need to establish the source of truth, define the output, and work out how to tell whether the process succeeded.

Those decisions are becoming more interesting to me than finding the perfect prompt. They require understanding the work well enough to redesign it around the model, including the places where the model should stay out of the way.