Every team in an AI augmented organisation operates with a division of labour between humans and AI systems. In most teams, that division has not been articulated. It is being negotiated, daily, by individual members making individual judgements without coordination. The result is a division of labour that nobody designed and that nobody is responsible for.
The third artefact in The Augmented Us framework is a tool to fix that. It is a three column document. It is reviewed quarterly. It distinguishes the work that AI accelerates, the work that humans must lead, and the work that is genuinely shared.
The three columns
Column one: AI accelerates. Work where the team has decided that AI involvement makes the team faster, more accurate or more consistent without compromising what the team is for. The role of the human is supervisory and editorial. The standard for inclusion in this column is that the team can defend, in plain language, why AI involvement here does not erode the team's judgement, relationships or standards.
Column two: humans lead. Work where the team has decided that the judgement, relationship or standard at stake is the work itself, and that AI involvement, beyond perhaps a research input at the start, would undermine the activity. The role of AI here, if any, is informational. The decision, the conversation, the commitment, the act of representation, are human.
Column three: genuinely shared. Work where the team has decided that AI and human contributions are intertwined and that neither side could deliver the work alone. The standard for inclusion here is a clear protocol that says who does what, in what sequence, with what handovers and what review. Without the protocol, work in this column drifts back into column one by default.
Why three columns, not two
The temptation is to draw the line as a binary, AI work and human work. The binary fails because most knowledge work is not binary. The most consequential work in modern organisations is collaborative by design, and the AI partner is now part of the collaboration whether it has been named or not.
The three column tool forces the team to think clearly about the third column, the genuinely shared work. That is the column where most of the value, and most of the risk, sits. The first two columns are easier to staff and easier to govern. The third column is where the team's character is being formed, and where leadership attention is most repaid.
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What goes wrong without the tool
Three failure modes recur in teams that have not done this work explicitly.
Quiet substitution. Work that the team would, on reflection, have placed in column two, drifts into column one. The team defaults to model output for tasks where the judgement was the point. By the time the team notices, the muscle for that judgement has atrophied.
Performative human. Work that the team has placed in column two, where humans lead, is in practice being done by AI with light human editing. The team tells itself the column is honest. It is not. The team's external positioning, that this work is human, becomes a vulnerability.
Unmanaged shared work. Work in column three is being done collaboratively, but without protocol. Different members handle the handoffs differently. Quality varies. Errors enter the work where the human review and the AI generation overlap and neither catches what the other missed.
The three column tool, used properly, surfaces all three failure modes early enough to act on.
How to use the tool
Run the exercise quarterly. The session takes ninety minutes. The team lists every category of work it does. The team places each category in one of the three columns, with a one sentence justification. The team then audits, against the previous quarter's tool, where things have moved. Movements between columns are the most useful signal in the exercise. They are the visible signature of identity drift.
The leader's job in the session is not to make the calls. The leader's job is to hold the standard. Categories do not enter column one without a defensible reason. Categories do not stay in column two without evidence that the team is actually leading the work. Categories do not enter column three without a written protocol.
Try this
Take five categories of work your team did this week. Place each in one of the three columns from memory. Now ask one team member to do the same exercise without seeing your answers. Compare the two. The disagreements are where your division of labour is being negotiated quietly, and where the next leadership conversation needs to be.
Get the full framework. This article draws on The Augmented Us white paper, the evidence based primer with the full six stage practice, the four practitioner artefacts and the research base. Download the white paper or take the team diagnostic.