Spotting AI Opportunities
Automate vs Augment
6 min+55 XPStep 1/10
Two products hiding in every AI idea
Automation removes the human from the loop: the model decides and acts. Augmentation keeps the human and makes them faster: the model drafts, suggests, and triages while a person decides.
Same capability underneath — completely different products. Automation needs near-perfect accuracy because nobody catches errors. Augmentation tolerates mistakes because review is built in. That's why copilots shipped years before autopilots in nearly every domain.
insight
The accuracy bar isn't a property of the model — it's a property of where you put the human. Augmentation lets you ship at 80% quality today; automation makes you wait for 99.9%.