Don't Point AI at Your Best Work

The first thing most teams do with AI is aim it at the crown jewels. The most important document, the hardest analysis, the work that matters most. Draft the BLA with it. It is the obvious move, and in a resource-constrained company it is often exactly backwards.

Every task has two dimensions, not one

Every task sits on two separate dimensions, and confusing them is the mistake. There is its value to the enterprise, which is simply whether the business needs it done. And there is its expert-judgment intensity, how much it actually draws on a skilled person’s judgment, their taste, their years of hard-won expertise, as opposed to merely their time.

These come apart constantly. A junior analyst re-typing the same vendor-onboarding email is doing work of real enterprise value, the business needs it, but of almost no judgment intensity, because nothing about it needs that particular person’s mind. Notice what that does not say. The person is not low-value; the task is. A regulatory scientist crafting a BLA narrative is doing work that is high on both at once.

Point AI at the high-enterprise, low-judgment corner

The corner to aim AI at first is the one the business needs done but that is beneath your scarce talent. High enterprise value, low expert-judgment intensity. That is where automation buys you the most, not because the task is important, but because the person is.

Consider your regulatory workload. It is tempting to sort it by document type: point AI at the INDs, protect the BLAs. That is too coarse, and it will mislead you. Plenty of IND work is the highest-judgment work you have, the first-in-human risk argument, the nonclinical justification, the protocol design. And plenty of a BLA is structured, repetitive drafting that consumes an expert’s time without truly needing their judgment. The dividing line is not the submission. It is the section, the table, the narrative, the review step. So do not start with your highest-judgment work. Decompose the important work until you find the portions that consume expertise without requiring it, and aim AI there, on purpose. You did not lower your standard on the work that matters. You stopped spending your rarest people on the parts that did not need them.

The value is second-order

Here is what makes this a discipline and not just task automation. The value of clearing low-judgment work is not the hours saved on that work. It is what the freed bandwidth gets redirected to.

Automate the analyst’s vendor email and you saved him twenty minutes a week, which is nothing. But that same small win freed him, and what he became was an AI Ambassador who changed how his whole function thought. That is the return, and it is second-order. If you free your best people’s time and it flows straight back into more low-value work, you saved hours and gained nothing. If it flows into the work only they can do, you multiplied your scarcest resource.

So the question is never “what can AI do here.” It is “what would this free my best people to do instead, and is that better.” Point AI at the grind, on purpose, so your genius lands only where genius is required. It is the same discipline as buying the commodity and building only what is yours, turned on your people instead of your stack: spend the scarce thing only where it compounds.

Take your team’s work and sort it on two axes, how much the business needs it and how much it needs this person’s judgment. Aim AI at the high-need, low-judgment corner first. Then name, out loud, where the freed hours are going. If you cannot name it, you have not found a use for AI. You have found a way to be busy faster.

Cheers,
-Titus