What Your Machines Should Do

AI is just automation’s latest chapter—yet too many organizations chase fully automated futures untethered from readiness and customer value. What Your Machines Should Do closes that Automation Strategy Gap. Stef Hutka draws on decades of lessons from human factors, HCI, cognitive science, and systems thinking to help you automate with intention: setting deliberate direction, sequencing rollout, and making grounded day-to-day decisions. Who should read this book This book is for design and product decision-makers navigating AI automation. This includes: Individual contributors looking to manage up, helping your team build a practical feel for what the technology can actually do. Managers guiding a team’s day-to-day automation choices, deciding what to build, what to adopt, and what to keep human. Senior leaders working to align technical capabilities with customer and business value. What you’ll take away Prioritize what and how to automate by weighing customer value, organizational readiness, and technical maturity. Build intuition about what the technology can and cannot do through hands-on activities. Evaluate the value of an automation solution across its user, task, and ecosystem layers. Map the beliefs that drive your organization before automating, because automation accelerates the system you already have. Reinforce your strategy through automation, rather than letting automation become the strategy. Anticipate the consequences of automation decisions to mitigate risk and surface opportunity. Design automated systems that expand cognition. Evaluate automated systems, before and after they ship.