Can I AI?
Name a task. Answer five quick questions. Get a clear verdict — Automate, AI-Assist, or Keep Human — and watch it join a running map of every task you've sorted.
About the book behind this tool
Managing the Machine is a practical, no-jargon guide written for the managers actually expected to make AI adoption work day to day. A recurring question in the book is a simple one: of everything on your team's plate, what actually belongs to a machine, what should a machine help with, and what has to stay with a person no matter how repetitive it looks?
This tool turns that question into a five-question scorecard. Score a task's Routineness (how repetitive it is, how clear the rules are) against its Human-Necessity (the stakes if it goes wrong, the context it depends on, how quietly a mistake could do damage), and you get a verdict grounded in the book's framework rather than a gut feeling.
Score one task, or score your whole task list — the workflow map below builds as you go.
View Managing the Machine on AmazonBe specific — "screening resumes" scores differently than "final hiring decisions."
Enter a task name to continue.
Question 1 of 5
Scoring:
Verdict for
Routineness
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Human-Necessity
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What to do with it
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Your Workflow Map
Every task you've scored, plotted by Routineness and Human-Necessity.
How this diagnostic works
Two scores, one verdict
Every task gets rated on five questions, 1–5 each. Questions 1–2 average into a Routineness Score (how repetitive it is, how clear and consistent the rules are). Questions 3–5 average into a Human-Necessity Score (the stakes if it's wrong, how much it depends on context an outsider wouldn't have, and how easily a mistake gets caught). Both scores are rescaled to 0–100.
The one veto
If you rate question 3 — the emotional, ethical, or reputational stakes of getting it wrong — at the top of the scale, the diagnostic stops and returns Keep Human immediately, skipping the remaining questions. No combination of routineness or convenience overrides a task where getting it wrong can do real, lasting harm.
Reading the grid
Outside the veto, a task lands in one of three zones: high Routineness paired with low Human-Necessity is Automate; low Routineness paired with high Human-Necessity is Keep Human; everything in between — which is most real tasks — is AI-Assist. There are no sub-tiers inside AI-Assist; it's one wide, deliberately unglamorous middle zone.
What this isn't
This is a starting judgment for one task at a time, not a compliance tool or an org-wide policy. Score enough tasks and the workflow map becomes a useful picture of where your team's automation effort is actually worth spending — but it's still a prompt for a conversation, not a verdict handed down from a machine.