transcript
show notes
This episode starts in a supermarket. In 1956, Taiichi Ohno saw shelves that were never piled high — restocked only as customers took what they needed. The customer pulled. The store replaced. That became just-in-time, the second pillar of the Toyota Production System.
A few episodes ago, we built an agent that knows when to stop. This time I want to tell you about the day one of our agents did exactly what we asked.
On its first morning, it drafted about two hundred credit-and-rebills in roughly twenty minutes. It worked perfectly. And it buried the team it was built to help. A rule that had been sitting quietly in the process turned a pile of drafts into a pile of rework overnight.
We didn't have an agent problem. We had a flow problem.
I get into what just-in-time actually means, why so much batching in knowledge work was a human constraint all along, and the idea I keep coming back to: in the age of agents, capacity isn't the constraint anymore. Human attention is. Flow the machine work. Level the human work.
I also share how the bottleneck moved once we fixed the first one, how we plan to take a review step away on evidence, and why a process can get faster and slower at the same time.
If you take one thing away: pace your agents to your people. Never pace your people to your agents.
This continues the Lean AI arc, following Setting True North.
I'm Chris Bradley, CMO at Veritiv and head of the AI Transformation Lab. Subscribe for new episodes biweekly.
A few episodes ago, we built an agent that knows when to stop. This time I want to tell you about the day one of our agents did exactly what we asked.
On its first morning, it drafted about two hundred credit-and-rebills in roughly twenty minutes. It worked perfectly. And it buried the team it was built to help. A rule that had been sitting quietly in the process turned a pile of drafts into a pile of rework overnight.
We didn't have an agent problem. We had a flow problem.
I get into what just-in-time actually means, why so much batching in knowledge work was a human constraint all along, and the idea I keep coming back to: in the age of agents, capacity isn't the constraint anymore. Human attention is. Flow the machine work. Level the human work.
I also share how the bottleneck moved once we fixed the first one, how we plan to take a review step away on evidence, and why a process can get faster and slower at the same time.
If you take one thing away: pace your agents to your people. Never pace your people to your agents.
This continues the Lean AI arc, following Setting True North.
I'm Chris Bradley, CMO at Veritiv and head of the AI Transformation Lab. Subscribe for new episodes biweekly.
