Your Intelligence Budget

Most businesses ask the wrong question about AI.

They ask, "What can we automate?"

The better question is, "Where do we actually need a person?"

The method is simple. Take a process. Strip away everything a machine can handle. What's left is the work that requires human judgment: scanning for accuracy, making decisions, persuading other people.

That remainder is your intelligence budget. It's the people, time, and attention your organization spends on things only humans can do.

How Work Evolves

A century ago, most of the work was physical. Then it was clerical. Now it's judgment.

Manual to mechanical to automated to intelligent.

At each stage, the human role doesn't disappear. It moves up. A machine takes over one layer of work and people shift to the layer above it. Filing cabinets replaced by databases. Data entry replaced by OCR. Pattern recognition replaced by AI.

What was hard becomes easy, what was impossible becomes hard, and people move to the new hard thing.

The question every organization faces now is: where exactly does the human role land next?

Data Entry and Decisions

In business, every interaction with a computer comes down to two things: data entry and decisions.

Machines are good at data entry now. They read documents, extract numbers, move information between systems. They're fast and they don't get tired.

An AI can pull an invoice amount from a PDF. A person confirms it matches what was expected.

The machine produces an output. Someone has to decide if it's good enough, tune the parameters, adjust the thresholds. This gets less frequent over time, but it rarely hits zero.

Then there's the real reason you're looking at the screen in the first place: decisions and persuasion.

You check your dashboard every morning to decide if you need to take action. You read a report because it has data you need to plan your strategy. Every piece of computer output exists to inform a decision.

Persuasion is the same thing, pointed outward. You pull the numbers to make your case to your boss. You build a proposal to influence a potential customer. You're using data to compel someone else's decision.

Checking the machine's work, tuning its output, and making the calls it can't. That's where your intelligence budget goes.

Old Way, New Way

When a company decides to bring in AI, someone has to figure out what changes. There are two ways to do this.

The old way starts with the person. You look at someone's job, list everything they do, and ask: which of these tasks can a machine take over? Then you remove those tasks one by one. Whatever is left, the person still does.

This works, but it's slow. It's also biased. You're anchored to how the job looks today. You end up automating pieces of an existing process instead of rethinking whether the process should exist at all.

The new way starts with the outcome. You ask: what result does the business need? Then you work backward. Design the process from scratch, assuming the machine does everything. Only add a person where one is genuinely required.

The old way asks, "What can we take off Sarah's plate?" The new way asks, "What does it take to get an invoice paid, and where in that process does a person actually need to be involved?"

One "streamlines workflows." The other assigns people to decisions, not data entry.

Your Intelligence Budget

Every organization has one. Most don't know it.

It's the total cost of human judgment in your business. Every hour someone spends checking a number, reviewing an output, making a call, or building a case for a stakeholder. That's the budget.

Right now, most of it is spent on work that machines can already do. People checking things that don't need checking. People entering data that could enter itself. People formatting reports that nobody reads.

Let artificial intelligence handle the rest. That's where your people belong, doing the work only real intelligence can do.