The AI Decision Tree: Should I Use AI for This?
You’re looking at a task, wondering whether AI belongs anywhere near it. This tree answers that in five questions, asked in order. Stop at the first question that gives you a colour: green means go with verification, amber means AI assists while you lead, red means keep it fully human. It takes about thirty seconds once you know it — and it prevents the expensive mistakes.
Why this matters
Without a routine, people make the AI decision by mood: enthusiasts push everything through it, sceptics push nothing, and both get burnt — one by a leaked detail or invented fact, the other by watching colleagues hand back hours they’re still spending. A decision tree replaces mood with a repeatable check that takes less time than the doubt did.
The five questions
- Does it involve confidential or personal information? Salary details, board papers, client data, health information, anything about an identifiable person. If yes: only continue if your organisation has approved a tool for exactly this data. No approved tool means red — keep it human.
- Is the task mostly production? Drafting, summarising, analysing, comparing, brainstorming. If it’s actually a judgement about a person, a decision, or a difficult conversation, that’s red — AI can at most help you prepare.
- Could you tell if the output was wrong? If you lack the knowledge or the source documents to verify it properly, that’s amber at best — don’t use AI alone here.
- Does the outcome directly affect a person? Hiring, performance, health, legal standing, money. If yes: amber — you lead, AI assists under close supervision, and the final call is documented as yours.
- Would an undetected error be costly or embarrassing? If yes: green with guardrails — verify line by line before it leaves you. If no: green — brief it, draft it, verify it, done.
Reading the colours
- Green — go. AI drafts, you verify. This is where the time savings live.
- Amber — assist only. You lead, AI supports, review is heavier and the accountability is explicitly yours.
- Red — human only. Judgement about people, confidential content without an approved home, decisions with legal effect.
Notice what the tree never asks: which tool is trendy, or what a vendor demo showed. The questions are about the task, the information and the consequences — the things that don’t change between products.
Putting it into practice
- Run today’s task list through the tree — most people find more green than they expected and one red they’d been risking
- Ask IT which tools are approved for which data before you need the answer
- Put the five questions somewhere visible until they’re automatic
- When a task lands amber, decide the supervision before you start, not after
- Re-run the tree when a task’s stakes change — the same task can change colour
Key takeaways
- Five ordered questions turn ‘should I use AI?’ from a mood into a method
- Confidentiality is question one for a reason — it’s the unrecoverable mistake
- Verifiability decides whether AI is help or hazard on a task
- People-affecting outcomes are always amber or red
- The tree is tool-agnostic: it works whatever your organisation runs
Ready to find where AI fits into your work?
Stop wondering what AI could do and start with one real task. The free AI-Ready Starter Kit gives you a practical, plain-English framework for finding AI opportunities in your work — without handing over the judgement that should stay yours.
Working with AI, one real task at a time.