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Authority Is the Bottleneck
A purchasing recommendation is generated automatically. The system proposes a supplier, quantity, and delivery date. The numbers are rarely the problem. The real decision is whether the order should be released. As automation increases, this moment repeats across forecasts, transfers, and invoices. The work does not disappear. It concentrates at the point where a suggestion becomes a commitment.
The work is not in generating insight. It is in deciding whether the system may act.
As automation increases, this pattern repeats. Forecasts improve. Suggested transfers become more accurate. OCR extracts invoices cleanly. Yet labour does not disappear. It moves to the final point where state becomes irreversible.
This is not accidental. It is structural.
When a system creates executable state but does not own the authority to act, the only safe place to resolve uncertainty is at the boundary between creation and execution. All upstream intelligence remains advisory. All downstream consequences remain real.
Insight reduces uncertainty about what might be correct. It does not resolve who is allowed to act on it.
Execution pressure intensifies this concentration. As more records are created automatically, the volume of potential actions increases. Each carries operational consequence: stock movement, cash commitment, supplier liability, customer promise. Without explicit authority encoded in the system, every action must be individually sanctioned by someone who carries commercial responsibility.
Labour therefore concentrates exactly where consequence attaches.
A common assumption is that better prediction reduces work. It does not. It reduces analysis. It does not remove the need to decide whether the prediction is permitted to execute.
The operational trade-off is direct.
Either:
- The system is allowed to execute based on probabilistic confidence, increasing speed but transferring risk to the business.
Or:
- A human reviews each case before execution, containing risk but absorbing the throughput cost.
There is no third state while authority is undefined. “High confidence” is not authority. It is a statistical description.
As execution pressure increases, review load grows non-linearly. Exceptions expand to include edge cases, supplier anomalies, customer sensitivities, and timing conflicts. Humans are not checking arithmetic. They are absorbing commercial risk that the system is not authorised to hold.
The concentration effect is therefore predictable:
- Creation scales with automation.
- Authority remains human.
- Review converges at the execution boundary.
- Labour accumulates exactly there.
Blaming users for conservatism is wrong. Removing review without redefining authority is unsafe. Improving intelligence without redefining authority is irrelevant.
Under execution pressure, labour must concentrate at the point of permission when authority is undefined. It cannot dissipate elsewhere.
Until execution authority is made explicit and system-owned, increasing intelligence will increase the volume of decisions that require human sanction rather than reducing them.