AI Vocabulary · 05 Agents
What is Automation vs. Augmentation?
Letting AI do a task alone versus helping a person do it better. Most good use is augmentation.
Automation means the AI does a task end to end without a person: classifying incoming tickets, extracting invoice data, routing requests. Augmentation means the AI helps a person do the task better or faster: drafting, researching, suggesting, checking.
Most real work mixes both. A useful way to decide is to break a task into steps and ask, for each one: is it repetitive and easy to check, so it can be automated, or does it need judgement, relationships or accountability, so the AI should support a person?
Why it matters for you
Starting with augmentation is lower risk and builds your team's skills and trust. Automate a step once you have seen it work reliably many times, and have a way to catch errors.
Own it
Deciding which parts of the work stay human is a strategic choice, not a technical one. Make it consciously, rather than letting a tool's defaults make it for you.
Where it comes from
The debate is older than modern computers. In 1960 J.C.R. Licklider described "man-computer symbiosis", and in 1962 Douglas Engelbart wrote Augmenting Human Intellect, arguing that computers should make people more capable rather than replace them (Wikipedia). Engelbart later demonstrated the mouse, hypertext and video calls, all tools for augmentation.
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