The consulting work hasn't changed shape in twenty years: sit with the business, map how the work actually flows, find the waste, engineer it out. What's changed is one new question we ask at every step on the map where a human applies judgment — could an agent do this one?
The answer comes from two numbers: what it costs to keep a person in that loop, and the blast radius if the agent gets it wrong. Small radius and clear savings, the agent takes the task. Big radius, a person keeps the controls — and the map remembers why.
That second case matters more than it looks. A value stream map ages, but it doesn't die. Models and harnesses mature every quarter — tighter scoping, cheaper rollback — and each time they do, the risk on some step drops below the bar. A step that keeps its person today gets a second look next year, and that look starts from a drawn map, not a blank page. The deliverable compounds.
I've already lived this at home — my second brain took over my own toil loops a while ago, and I don't want a single one of them back. The same shift is coming for the ordinary office day. So much of knowledge work is translation — the status deck and the email explaining what the other email meant. An agent with standing attention on your files and your workflows can produce that summary on demand, current as of right now. That repetition used to be necessary toil — restating context was the only way it moved between people. Once an agent already holds the context, the redundancy loses its reason to exist.
That's the part that gets lost when people hear "taking the human out of the loop." The loops that go first are toil — the re-keying, the swivel-chair handoffs, the approvals nobody can explain. Real careers sit on some of those steps, and pretending otherwise is how this argument loses people. Moving them UP into the judgment work is part of the engineering, not something that happens on its own. The judgment loops with real blast radius still belong to humans, and will for a while; there is more of that work than we have ever had time to do.
My own blast-radius line keeps moving. I'll let you know where it lands.