Rule, AI, or human: who should do the task?
Ten everyday business tasks. For each one, decide whether a simple rule-based automation, an AI step, or a person should handle it. It is the most useful skill in planning automation.
Who should do the work?
The best automation plans give each task to the right worker: fixed rules for predictable steps, AI for language and judgment within limits, and people for decisions that need authority, empathy, or accountability.
- Ten realistic scenarios
- An explanation after every answer
- A quick way to sharpen your automation instincts
Send a reminder text 24 hours before every appointment.
Read incoming emails and decide whether each is a sales inquiry, a support request, or an invoice.
Decide whether to offer a discount to an upset long-time customer.
Copy every new paid order from your online store into your accounting software.
Pull the invoice number, date, vendor, and total from PDF invoices sent by dozens of different suppliers.
Draft a reply to a detailed customer question using your help articles.
Negotiate contract terms with a new enterprise client.
When a deal is marked won in the CRM, create the project, send the welcome email, and notify the team.
Turn a 40-minute sales call recording into notes and next steps for the CRM.
Tell an employee they did not get the promotion they applied for.
A simple way to decide
- Rule-based automation for predictable steps with structured data: reminders, notifications, moving records between apps, creating tasks.
- An AI step where the input is language or varies too much for rules: sorting messages, extracting data from documents, summarizing, drafting.
- A person for decisions that need authority, empathy, negotiation, or accountability, and for reviewing AI output where mistakes are costly.
Most real workflows mix all three. A support workflow might use a rule to log every ticket, AI to sort and draft replies, and a person to approve refunds. The guide to AI vs. automation explains how to combine them.
Frequently asked questions
When should I use AI instead of regular automation?
Use AI when a step requires understanding or producing language, or when inputs vary too much for fixed rules, such as free-text emails or documents in many layouts. Use regular automation for everything predictable; it is cheaper, faster, and easier to audit.
Which tasks should never be automated?
Decisions with legal, financial, or personal consequences that need accountability, such as hiring decisions, sensitive HR conversations, and binding commitments, should stay with people. Automation can still gather information and schedule the work around them.
What does human in the loop mean?
It means the workflow pauses for a person to review or approve a step before it continues, such as approving an AI-drafted email before it is sent.