Build an AI-assisted workflow

A workflow names four things: the trigger, the prompt, the human review step, and the final action. Writing it down is what turns occasional clever use into a repeatable business process someone else can run. Include the failure path: what happens when the output is wrong or the tool is unavailable. A workflow without a fallback stops the business when the tool does. A common mistake is documenting only the happy path, where the tool works and the output is fine, and leaving out what happens when it fails. A workflow without a fallback quietly stops the business the first time the tool is unavailable or produces something clearly wrong, because nobody knows what to do instead. Deciding who owns the human review step matters as much as deciding that a review step exists. If review is assigned to "whoever is free," it tends to get skipped during busy periods, which is exactly when mistakes are most likely to slip through. Name one person or role as the reviewer, even if that person delegates it sometimes. You can judge whether a workflow is genuinely documented, versus just understood informally, by asking a teammate who has never run it to try it from the written steps alone. If they get stuck or have to ask you questions the document should have answered, the workflow is not finished yet, even if it has worked fine for you personally. A small events company built a workflow to draft client recap emails after each event, but never wrote down what to do if the drafting tool was down on a deadline day. The first outage left the office scrambling. Adding a one-line fallback, write the recap manually from the same event notes, took five minutes to document and prevented the same scramble the next time it happened.

Key takeaways

• Writing it down is what turns occasional clever use into a repeatable business process someone else can run.
• Include the failure path: what happens when the output is wrong or the tool is unavailable.
• Teams design for the happy path and stall on the first failure.

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