Audit the chain from evidence to action.

Video caption

Audit the chain from evidence to action.

More completed tasks can coexist with less decision clarity.

Trace source, version, condition, owner and result.

My rule: Do this because automation should increase decision quality.

#EricFieldNotes

Full written post / accessibility read

My 'attention drift bubble' is a hypothesis, not a quantified market fact. A leadership team can test it by sampling consequential commitments and asking whether the source, caveat, owner and outcome remain reconstructable.

If a customer exception became a generic policy in three AI handoffs, the organization may have a large body of output but a thin chain of authority. Recovery then consumes leadership time when the assumption breaks.

Choose changes with customer, money or architecture impact. Have an independent reviewer reconstruct the original decision, compare it with executed behavior and time the reconstruction. Record orphaned, expired or contradicted commitments and later reversals.

If the audit finds rising attention debt, repair the handoff and owner gates before adding more agent throughput. If it finds clean provenance and low reversal cost, keep the measured system. The evidence should decide whether this risk thesis applies.

#EricFieldNotes

Four-beat scene transcript

1. Audit the chain from evidence to action.

My 'attention drift bubble' is a hypothesis, not a quantified market fact. A leadership team can test it by sampling consequential commitments and asking whether the source, caveat, owner and outcome remain reconstructable.

Visual: Do this before scaling an AI-driven management process.

2. The dangerous metric is unrecoverable reasoning.

If a customer exception became a generic policy in three AI handoffs, the organization may have a large body of output but a thin chain of authority. Recovery then consumes leadership time when the assumption breaks.

Visual: More completed tasks can coexist with less decision clarity.

3. Define a monthly audit sample.

Choose changes with customer, money or architecture impact. Have an independent reviewer reconstruct the original decision, compare it with executed behavior and time the reconstruction. Record orphaned, expired or contradicted commitments and later reversals.

Visual: Trace source, version, condition, owner and result.

4. Scale only after the chain holds.

If the audit finds rising attention debt, repair the handoff and owner gates before adding more agent throughput. If it finds clean provenance and low reversal cost, keep the measured system. The evidence should decide whether this risk thesis applies.

Visual: Do this because automation should increase decision quality.

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.