Delegation is a judgment you already know how to make
When you hand work to a person, you ask three things without noticing: how bad is it if this is wrong, would I spot it, and does it matter that I did it?
Those exact questions work for AI, and they sort your week fast.
Blast radius
A typo in an internal doc costs a laugh. A wrong number in a board deck costs your credibility. Delegate freely where mistakes are cheap and recoverable.
Detectability
Can you tell it's wrong at a glance? You'll spot a bad meeting summary instantly, because you were in the meeting. You will not spot a plausible-sounding but wrong claim about a market you don't know. Delegate where you'd notice.
Does the authorship matter?
This is the one managers get wrong, and the one with teeth — because with a person, delegation still means a human paid attention. With AI, nobody did.
Some communication carries weight precisely because you personally did it. Its value is the evidence of attention, not the words.
Never delegate
- Performance feedback. The message of feedback is "I paid attention to you." A generated version says the opposite, fluently.
- Condolences, apologies, recognition. The effort is the content.
- Bad news that affects someone's job.
- Any decision you'd have to defend in a room. If you can't explain the reasoning as your own, you don't have a decision. You have an output.
The asymmetry that should settle it: nobody ever thanks you for a well-drafted note. But finding out their performance review was generated is something a person tells their next three employers.