Should I keep AI away from my most important work?
Not never. But in a resource-constrained shop, point it at the low-judgment work first, and spend the bandwidth you free on the work only your best people can do.
Not as a rule. But the instinct to aim AI at your most important work first is usually the wrong allocation, and it is worth understanding why.
Your most important work is often also your highest-judgment work, the kind that needs your best people’s judgment, not just their time. A BLA narrative is the clearest example: it carries data analysis and a standard of perfection only an expert can hold. You can use AI to clear the blank page there, with a human owning every line. But if your experts are your bottleneck, spending their scarce attention supervising AI on the work that most needs them is not where automation pays.
The higher-return move, especially when you have more work than experts, is to point AI at the high-enterprise, low-judgment corner first: the work the business needs but that does not draw on your best people’s judgment. Resist sorting by whole document type, though. It is tempting to say point AI at the INDs and protect the BLAs, but that is too coarse. Some IND work is the highest-judgment work you have, and some of a BLA is routine drafting. Decompose the work to the section and the task, aim AI at the parts that consume expertise without requiring it, and spend the freed bandwidth on the parts only your experts can carry.
So the question is never whether AI is allowed to touch important work. It is what freeing your best people would let them do instead, and whether that is better. Point AI at the grind on purpose, and reserve your genius for where genius is required. The full argument is Don’t Point AI at Your Best Work.
Cheers,
-Titus
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