Automate, Augment, or Keep Human (Copy)
By Erik Montana, Chief Strategy Officer
Smith Clinesmith, LLP
In today’s business world there are consistent talks about how AI, Artificial Intelligence, is going to take your job. There is the notion that AI can do everything that a human can do. I am here to correct that notion especially when it comes to client communication. AI is meant to be an impact multiplier, not a replacement entirely. When looking at AI for client communication I find it most effective to group tasks into three different categories, Automate, Augment, and Keep Human. In this post we will talk about how to decide what bucket each task should fall into by using the four-question test that I have developed as well as discuss how AI can fail us.
How AI Fails us
AI doesn’t fail loudly; it fails fluently and nowhere is that clearer than in the courtroom. We have consistently seen cases come out where AI has hallucinated regularly about case details, case law, and even generating fake cases. The most common one is Mata v. Avianca where case law that was found by ChatGPT was fabricated and falsely created at least six citations and even invented cases, quotations, and legal reasoning. You may be asking well what about client communication, isn’t that the whole idea of this post, and you’d be right. One of the most common cases where AI failed in client communication was in 2024 when an AI chatbot for Air Canada told a client that he could apply for a bereavement fair on a ticket. This was not the policy of the company, but courts found that Air Canada was responsible and had to honor what the chatbot has said and pay additional fees. AI is a tool and the most important consideration is knowing what tool is right for the job at hand. There is no tool that is great for every job, but if that’s the case how do we know when to use it and more importantly how to use it?
What is the Difference: Automate, Augment, or Keep Human
Let’s talk about the three buckets mentioned in this post and what they mean. Automate, in plain terms means to give the system full control. It is a task that has no human touch, it is triggered by an action performed, i.e. a date is entered into your CRM, so the client gets a prefabricated message that updates them on the status of the case. These types of tasks are typically the ones that we have happen frequently. Automation is what the common media references when they say AI is going to take everyone’s job. The middle ground is something we call the augment bucket.
Augment is when the system and the human work together to complete a task more efficiently. Now you may be asking as a firm owner, or operations manager why would we not want to augment everything? The simple answer is that augmentation only works when tasks don’t require human judgement for the task. If there is an emotional component, potential where the relationship can be damaged, or even client preferences this becomes a disqualification of implementing Ai. Augmentation works wonders and is where we truly see the impact multiplier that all the articles promise us, but technology is not always the solution to our issues. If we know that AI is not the option it leaves us with the final bucket.
Keeping things human, it is as simple as it sounds, this is where we are not using Ai, we are making the decision for ourselves, drafting the message, completing everything step by step. These types of tasks are those that require high levels of emotional intelligence, have major implications if done incorrectly, or items with lots of nuances. While keeping tasks entirely human based can be a “time suck” these items are the ones that will have the biggest impact on your company in either a positive or negative way, so it makes it worth the extra 5 minutes. Now that we know the basics of what automate, augment, and keeping human mean let’s look at the four-question test that will help us decide where each task belongs.
The Four Question Test
When looking at tasks it can sometimes be difficult to decide what to automate and what to have a human do. While there are tasks that you look at and instantly know what to do, it is the tasks that live in the grey area that perplex us. I have developed a four-question test to help us make this decision easier and fool proof.
Q1. What is the Emotional Weight of the task?
If the task requires a high level of emotional intelligence, then this is a task that would end up being an augmented or entirely human centric task. For example, if you are dealing with a client that has recently had a loved one pass away and are wanting to send a condolence message. While it may appear at first sight that something like this could be augmented to save time, when analyzing closer you will find that this task needs to be humanized entirely. Justification for this choice is as follows, while AI would be great to get the first draft going it is important to proofread it, add the human touch to it, and get the empathy articulated appropriately for our client, 9/10 you will find yourself revising the entire message to get it just right. Not only will keeping it human save us the time of revisions, but it keeps the most important item at the forefront and that is the care and compassion we have for our clients.
Q2. What impact would Ambiguity have?
In the age of needing to keep up with high, fast-paced work demands it’s easy to say AI draft this response and just hit send, or better yet to create a workflow that will do it all by the click of a button, no review necessary, but many times when we do this we do not consider the impact that canned or ambiguous response can have on our client. We have all received one of these types of responses, I got one today actually from my doctor that said, “Please give us a call at your earliest convenience to discuss your test results.” While the message did not have a tone that implied anything immediately wrong and the intention was not bad, the anxiety and uncertainty that the message caused was an unforeseen outcome. It made me feel as if I was sick, I questioned the sniffly nose that I thought was allergies. I dropped everything and made that call all for them to say, “clean bill of health.” Ambiguity can be a trust killer when it comes to client relationships. If my doctor office had augmented that message even with a simple statement of “…everything came clear, just wanted to follow-up.”, it would have eased the anxiety and let me continue with my day instead of uprooting it. Ambiguity does not mean that a task cannot have AI baked into it. It simply means that we must consider all the potential outcomes and decide what human components need to be added to maintain and nurture the relationship with our client, it is about how we augment these ambiguous tasks.
Q3. How Frequently does this task occur?
Frequency and Volume is the third criteria you need to explore. Does this task happen daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.? Once you uncover the number of times your staff is having to complete this task you can determine if an automation makes sense. If this is a task that happens frequently, I would recommend you look at automating. While it would be easier to set a threshold that tells you if something happens “x times” in a week then we automate it, the process is not that simple. We must still consider the first two questions in this process. While more frequent tasks can be automated as they are typically more formulaic rather than human dependent, we must ensure that we are checking if there is a negative consequence of making this full automated. My general rule of thumb is, if this task happens more than once a week, I want to look at the possibility of automating the task, if it is not an automatable task then I would look to augmentation. However, note that just because I evaluate it for automation does not mean that we will automate or even augment the task. Each task is evaluated on a case-by-case circumstance, and you must do what is best for your business.
Q4. What does this do to the Trust we have built?
We touched on trust a little previously when we talked about ambiguity, but trust is the underlying idea that should be the base of all the previous questions. Our job is about maintaining the trust and the relationship we have built with our client. That idea stretches further than just the legal world; it spans all business areas. You may be curious as to why trust is the last question if it is so important, and the simple answer is because it is the most important item and must maintain the last and final focus. If a task was to make it through the first three questions, I wanted there to be a final question that caught all the outlying tasks that live in that grey area mentioned above. We want our clients to trust us for many reasons, continued business, referrals, but more importantly for the difficult conversations that may occur. Within the legal realm there is not a case where we must have a difficult conversation, whether that be in deposition preparation, trial preparation, or settlement conversations. Our clients must have complete trust in us that we are doing our best and always making decisions with them in mind. If trust ever has the potential to be damaged the task automatically falls into the augment task category, at minimum, but can even go to the keep human category.
Checks and Balances
We have now covered the four-question test, the different, buckets and even explored how AI can fail us, I wish I could say if you follow this once then you are set, but the reality is there is one final piece, a checks and balance system. What works today may not work a month, a quarter, or a year from now. Regardless of how fool proof you make these AI integrations you must consistently make sure you are gauging feedback from your clients and staff, ensure that the AI integration is benefiting your company, and that there isn’t a need for modification to the workflow. AI is a tool that will take your client communication to the next level and what will distinguish your business from your competitors, as long as you follow the four-question test and perform your checks and balances your business is on the correct path to having the best client communication achievable.
Till next time,
Erik Montana
Chief Strategy Officer
Smith Clinesmith, LLP