The question is no longer "Should we use AI?"
The question is: "What should AI do independently, what should it assist with, and what should remain exclusively human?"
This is the AI agent decision. And most organizations are approaching it backwards.
They're asking: "What can AI do?"
The better question is: "What should AI do—and under what conditions?"
The Current State: Everyone Has Pilots, Few Have Strategy
Organizations are running AI experiments across departments:
Marketing is testing content generation
Sales is experimenting with outreach automation
Customer service is deploying chatbots
HR is piloting resume screening
Finance is automating report generation
Some work. Some fail. Most exist in limbo—successful enough to continue, not successful enough to scale.
The pattern that emerges:
Success isn't random. It correlates with a clear answer to a specific question: "In this workflow, is AI acting independently, assisting humans, or both—and is that the right choice?"
Organizations that answer this question systematically scale AI successfully.
Organizations that don't remain stuck in pilot purgatory.
The Three-Zone Framework
Every workflow, task, or decision falls into one of three zones. The zone determines how AI should be deployed—or whether it should be deployed at all.
