Practical AI · Original guide
Give an AI assistant a drafting job before an action job
Separate useful suggestions from permission to change records, send messages or spend money.
Published · 15 November 2026 · Synthetic examples, not measured app results
Name the action boundary
‘Help with follow-ups’ can mean making a checklist, drafting a message or actually contacting someone. Specify which you want. Begin with a draft that a person can inspect. Access to information is not the same as permission to send, publish, pay or modify a live business record.
In a fictional small business, an assistant might propose three follow-up tasks from a deliberately prepared sample list. The operator reviews the recipient, purpose and wording before any message is sent. No real contact list is needed for this initial trial.
Review the exact thing that will happen
A review should show the destination, proposed content and expected change. ‘Looks good’ on an earlier draft should not silently authorise a later rewrite. If a material detail changes, return it for review.
For a record change, show the before-and-after values. For a message, show the recipient and final text. For a scheduled task, show when it will run and what happens if a dependency is missing.
Design the stop condition
Choose a bounded pilot: one kind of task, a small number of examples and a named reviewer. Make it possible to stop new work while retaining drafts and history. Missing permissions, unclear sources and unknown costs should become visible exceptions, not reasons for the assistant to improvise.
A subscription alert is not a precise spending stop. Before enabling paid automated generation, require known price limits, a worst-case reservation for each job, controlled concurrency and bounded retries. If those controls are absent, keep the trial manual and do not assume costs are capped.
Check usefulness without claiming autonomy
Measure how many drafts the reviewer accepted, edited or rejected and why. Count review time. Only consider broader permissions once the narrow task is reliable and the business has explicitly chosen the new authority.
Assistant and resolution-tracking ideas can help frame this discussion, but this article makes no claim about Mary Assistant or Resolution Assurance features, safety guarantees or readiness. The checklist is useful independently of any app purchase.