What Your Machines Should Do

This book is a field manual for steering automation to extend human capabilities and drive business results. It addresses the Automation Strategy Gap, where aspirations of fully automated futures become disconnected from organizational readiness and customer value.

The book frames AI as the latest chapter in a long history of automation, drawing on decades of durable lessons from human factors, HCI, cognitive science, systems thinking, and management theory to help you automate with intention. Readers gain frameworks and tools to set deliberate direction (where the organization is going and why), directed progression (how to sequence automation rollout to get there), and grounded tactics (day-to-day decisions about how to automate).

Who should read this book

This book is for design and product decision-makers navigating AI automation. This includes:

• Individual contributors looking to manage up, helping your team build a practical feel for what the technology can actually do.
• Managers guiding a team’s day-to-day automation choices, deciding what to build, what to adopt, and what to keep human.
• Senior leaders working to align technical capabilities with customer and business value.

What you’ll take away

• Prioritize what and how to automate by weighing customer value, organizational readiness, and technical maturity.
• Build intuition about what the technology can and cannot do through hands-on activities.
• Evaluate the value of an automation solution across its user, task, and ecosystem layers.
• Map the beliefs that drive your organization before automating, because automation accelerates the system you already have.
• Reinforce your strategy through automation, rather than letting automation become the strategy.
• Anticipate the consequences of automation decisions to mitigate risk and surface opportunity.
• Design automated systems that expand cognition.
• Evaluate automated systems, before and after they ship.