# AI in Plain English

By [DYLIT Chronicles](https://dylit.info/user/dylitmediabuzz)

[Everything AI - beyond the hype](https://dylit.info/pr/everything-ai-beyond-the-hype/6a9efac02e92664f4d50cf9d) > [AI in Plain English](https://dylit.info/ch/ai-in-plain-english/6ab3536999638e119f592c02)

The One Question That Tells You If AI Can Help People burn a lot of time deciding whether AI is suited to a given task. There is a shortcut, and it fits in one question. What is my rough draft here? If you can answer that, the tool has a job. If you cannot, it does not. Think about what that question is really testing. It asks whether you already hold the substance, and what you need is for it to be shaped. Turned into prose, restructured, shortened, categorised, made suitable for a different reader. Text goes in, text comes out, and you can tell whether the result is right because you knew the content before you started. That is the shape of task these systems are built for. Now consider where the question fails. You need last month's actual numbers. You need to know whether a clause is enforceable in your jurisdiction. You need to know what a competitor announced this week. There is no rough draft in your head, because what you are missing is the information itself. Ask anyway and you will get an answer. It will read well. It may be invented, and you will have no way to tell, because you did not know the answer going in. Two examples, same afternoon You have forty pages of customer interview notes and you need the themes. Rough draft exists: the themes are in the notes, you just have not extracted them. Good fit. You need to know how many customers renewed last quarter. No rough draft. That number lives in a system, and asking a language model for it is asking it to guess. Bad fit, and a dangerous one, because a plausible number is worse than no number. The honest consequence This question also reveals something about your own work that is slightly uncomfortable. The tasks where AI helps most are the ones where you were doing production work. Typing, formatting, restructuring, turning notes into sentences. The tasks where it cannot help are the ones requiring you to know something, decide something, or take responsibility for something. Which means the time it gives back is production time, and what you do with that time is up to you. You can finish earlier. Or you can spend it on the part of the job nothing else can do. Next time you are unsure whether to open the tool, ask yourself what your rough draft is. If the answer comes quickly, go ahead. If you find yourself stalling, that hesitation is the answer.