Why this volume exists
Automation almost never fails at the task. It fails at the check. Whether anyone can still run that check depends on whether anyone left in the building could do the work themselves, which is the capacity that quietly decays inside the arrangement that depends on it.
The case it opens with
A twenty agent real estate brokerage automated part of its nurturing sequence. Every message went out on schedule, correctly formatted, with every field populated from the right record. Nothing in the system reported a fault. What the sequence had stopped carrying was what the agent knew about the family, which had never been written down as a step, because to the people doing it it was not a step. It was what you say to someone you met on a Saturday.
Where the evidence went against me
Two admissions sit in this volume. A randomized trial found expert developers were nineteen percent slower using AI assistance while believing they were twenty percent faster, which contradicts a position I had held about expertise. And the central mechanism of one chapter belongs to a 1983 control engineering paper arguing that the supervisor of an automated process must be more skilled, not less. I had not read it until this book was researched, and the text says so rather than absorbing the idea quietly.
What was cut
The forty seven percent employment figure everyone cites is examined rather than repeated, including the backtest it failed. Three conditions decide whether a task is eligible for automation, and a fourth decides whether it stays eligible. The tasks people most want to automate are the ones that qualify least.
Where to read it
Principles of Practice, Volume VI: AI and Automation Operations. It Was Working, and Nobody Could Tell Published by the National Board of Operations Professionals. The publisher page for this volume carries the full description and how it maps to the standard.
Operating notes and
standards drafts
No cadence promises, only when there is something worth sending.