workflow-redesign

Financial Times 2026-04-17-1

Why 'glue work' can finally shine in the age of AI

Most companies automating code-writing haven't touched their promotion criteria: the skill AI just made abundant is still the one that gets you promoted. The FT frames this as a win for "glue workers," but the real signal is organizational: enterprises running AI transformation without repricing what "good" looks like will lose their most adaptable people first, compounding the very talent gap AI was supposed to close.

# tags

ai-labor workforce-dynamics enterprise-ai org-design ai-labor-displacement ai-economics workflow-redesign ai-coding-tools pilot-to-scale ft

Back of Mind 2026-04-17-3

The Most Important Number

Dan Davies identifies the number nobody wants to find: how many words of AI output can a manager verify per day before judgment silently degrades? The self-driving car literature already answered this for monitoring tasks; the same vigilance decrement applies to AI output review. Organizations will systematically overestimate their people's verification capacity, and unlike physical exhaustion, cognitive degradation is invisible to the person experiencing it. The binding constraint on AI leverage isn't generation capability; it's human verification throughput, and we're structurally incentivized never to measure it.

# tags

AI Adoption Enterprise AI Cognitive Load Org Design Human-AI Interaction ai-economics cognitive-load agentic-ai-viability reliability ai-and-human-capacity org-design workflow-redesign ai-adoption-patterns

◆ entities

Dan Davies Stafford Beer Frederick Winslow Taylor

→ threads

ai-economics agentic-ai-viability reliability pilot-to-scale

⟷ links

2026-04-07-1 2026-04-12-3 2026-04-14-2 2026-04-15-2

permalink