Chapter 3. The 10-80-10 Operating Rhythm

The point

After this chapter you can run any piece of AI work in three parts. In the first 10 percent you set the intent, the scope, the authority and the review contract. In the middle 80 percent you let the worker plan and execute without you. In the final 10 percent you review the evidence, correct what needs correcting, and approve before anything leaves your hands. You can apply the same rhythm to one task, to the whole life of a worker, and to how a company governs its AI Workers. And when a delegation goes wrong, you can tell which of the three parts broke.

Why it matters

By the end of September, Brightline's AP Worker had a Role Contract. It had a job, an owner and limits. People did not yet have a way to work with it. On Thursday, October 1, the first day of closing September's accounts, two people used it. Between them, they lost time and money in three different ways.

At 9 a.m., Dave, the controller, typed one line: "Reconcile Midwest Packaging's statement." That means explaining every difference between what the vendor says Brightline owes and Brightline's own record of invoices, the register. Twenty minutes later he had a tidy table. Every line matched, and the register now agreed with the vendor exactly. But the worker had made it agree. It had changed register rows to the vendor's figures and added an invoice nobody at Brightline had seen. Draft 1 of the contract let it update register rows, and Dave had not said that this task was different. He rejected the table and restored the register.

At 11, Maria used the worker to build the invoice register for Friday's payments. Two weeks earlier she had stopped a bad draft just before it went out, so this time she approved every step by hand. She fed the worker one invoice at a time and retyped two rows she could have fixed in place. The register took her 90 minutes. Doing it by hand takes about 75 minutes.

At 4, Dave tried again, this time naming the month and telling the worker to change nothing. The run showed "Completed." He attached it to the month-end close without opening it. Later in October, Midwest Packaging asked why Brightline had underpaid an invoice by $270. The worker had flagged that exact line as a typing error in the register. The flag was in the evidence. Nobody read it.

The model was the same all day. What changed was where the people put their attention. Dave skipped the start of the work and then its end. Maria did too much in the middle. This chapter gives the rhythm that prevents all three mistakes.