Practical guides · 2 min read
Field note 008Practical guides
Before you bring an AI tool into your work
The Workplace AI Decision
The cleverest model stopped being the whole decision.
01What happened
Cloudflare published an engineering account (3 August) of running frontier open models like Kimi and GLM at scale — and the interesting part wasn't the models, it was everything around them: memory pressure, cost, latency, and integrity checks. The same week, DeepSeek shipped a model that scored near the top on agentic coding at a fraction of the price of the frontier leaders. The lesson underneath both: picking an AI tool for real work is a systems decision, not a leaderboard pick.
02Why it matters to you
When you adopt an AI tool for a recurring task — summarising research, drafting client updates, checking a document — the model's cleverness is maybe half the decision. The other half is what it costs per use, how long it takes, what data it touches, and whether a human sees the output before it goes out. Advisors rarely get burned by choosing a "worse" model. They get burned by skipping those four questions.
03How to do it — the Workplace AI Decision (run it once, before you adopt a tool for a task; use a task of your own, never client data)
- FIT
Does it actually do this task well? Test it on five real examples of your own, not the demo.
- COST
What does one use cost, and what do 100 uses a month cost? Cheap-per-use adds up; frontier-per-use adds up faster.
- DATA
What does it see, and where does that data go? If the task touches anything sensitive, that answer decides everything else.
- SPEED
Is it fast enough that you'll actually keep using it, or will you quietly drop it by week two?
- HUMAN GATE
Who checks the output before it's used? For anything client-facing, that's you.
Score each red / amber / green. Any red on DATA or HUMAN GATE, and the tool doesn't get the task yet.
04The lesson
The fastest-moving number this week was price — a capable model got dramatically cheaper overnight. But the tool that wins your workflow isn't the cleverest or the cheapest; it's the one that fits the task, respects your data, and keeps you in the loop. Choosing AI at work is a five-question decision, and the model is only one of the five.
