March 31, 2026“Does it require judgement or does it require hands?” ← that’s the question every AI conversation should begin with. It’s the first step in bridging the Atomization Gap (the biggest problem I see in early AI deployments right now).
I was in a working session with a client a few months back, and they’d spent probably twenty minutes talking through what they thought their agentic AI strategy ought to be…. where they saw opportunity, what pressure they were getting from the C-Suite, all of it.
The second they stopped to take a breath, I asked them a series of simple questions that actually drives the correct answers for what they wanted:
Could someone walk me through exactly what happens when a sales lead calls your office? Step by step.
Most organizations, when asked point blank, can’t give me a granular, step-by-step, task-by-task, workflow-by-workflow answer to “how does your business operate?”.
That’s what I call the Atomization Gap.
Before you can even think about successful agentic deployments, you have to atomize the entire business.
You need to fully map out every workflow of importance down to its atomic unit — the task.
Only then can you determine what requires human judgement (for which you need the best possible people in the loop here), or what requires hands (we just need something to execute on the insight/judgement provided).
“Hands” are all AI (at least in theory).
Agents are fundamentally about decomposing your business into individual tasks inside workflows and then figuring out which of those tasks actually require a human and which ones are just consuming time. If there isn’t a value-add from a human handling execution work, that’s a prime candidate for automation. If there isn’t judgement-in-the-loop, and it’s truly just “execute on the plan,” then we’re cooking with agentic gas.
But most organizations haven’t mapped that yet. They have habits and tribal knowledge about how things get done, but not an actual task-level picture of any given workflow. And without that picture, the agentic AI conversation stays pretty abstract. You end up buying tools before you know what you’re trying to do with them.
The work that has to come first (and I’ll admit it’s not glamorous) is sitting down with your actual workflows and enumerating every step.
For each step: who does it, how long does it take, and what does it actually require from a person? Does it require judgment, or does it require hands?
That distinction is the whole game. Because once you know where the judgment actually lives in your organization, the automation question becomes pretty answerable. Until then, you’re mostly guessing.
I’ve watched a lot of teams try to skip this part. It tends to produce impressive-looking pilots and not a lot else.
Jeff Francis is a veteran entrepreneur and founder of Dallas-based digital product studio ENO8. Jeff founded ENO8 to empower companies of all sizes to design, develop and deliver innovative, impactful digital products. With more than 18 years working with early-stage startups, Jeff has a passion for creating and growing new businesses from the ground up, and has honed a unique ability to assist companies with aligning their technology product initiatives with real business outcomes.
Sign up for power-packed emails to get critical insights into why software fails and how you can succeed!
Whether you have your ducks in a row or just an idea, we’ll help you create software your customers will Love.
LET'S TALK