Attention is a company control.

Video caption

Attention is a company control.

An owner may see only the shortened artifact.

Use it where rights, money or architecture change.

My rule: Do this because automation can hide who decided.

#EricFieldNotes

Full written post / accessibility read

The productivity story is that one employee's AI can draft a plan and another employee's AI can consume it. The governance question is whether any accountable person read the original source when the proposal turned into a commitment.

In a fictional pilot, a manager approves a clean summary that omits a security condition. Engineering executes that summary. The failure is not simply model hallucination; the organization allocated attention to the wrong document at the decisive moment.

Name the person who must inspect the authoritative decision for consequential actions. Require a short readback of scope, conditions and uncertainty before release. Routine low-stakes formatting can move faster; the costly boundary gets deliberate attention.

Log which source the owner opened, which condition they accepted and what action followed. This is my proposed operating design; research on attention and critical thinking motivates the test but does not prove a company-wide AI drift rate.

#EricFieldNotes

Four-beat scene transcript

1. Attention is a company control.

The productivity story is that one employee's AI can draft a plan and another employee's AI can consume it. The governance question is whether any accountable person read the original source when the proposal turned into a commitment.

Visual: Automating every handoff can remove the moment of judgment.

2. The organization can approve a paraphrase.

In a fictional pilot, a manager approves a clean summary that omits a security condition. Engineering executes that summary. The failure is not simply model hallucination; the organization allocated attention to the wrong document at the decisive moment.

Visual: An owner may see only the shortened artifact.

3. Budget a source readback.

Name the person who must inspect the authoritative decision for consequential actions. Require a short readback of scope, conditions and uncertainty before release. Routine low-stakes formatting can move faster; the costly boundary gets deliberate attention.

Visual: Use it where rights, money or architecture change.

4. Make attention auditable.

Log which source the owner opened, which condition they accepted and what action followed. This is my proposed operating design; research on attention and critical thinking motivates the test but does not prove a company-wide AI drift rate.

Visual: Do this because automation can hide who decided.

Research and claim limits

• NIST AI RMF 1.0 (S171)
• Lee et al., The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking, CHI 2025 (S172)
• Ocasio, Towards an Attention-Based View of the Firm (S81)

The examples identified as illustrative or simulated are design probes, not reported incidents. Vendor specifications do not establish workload performance.