One job, start to finish

You will follow one small company through this book: Brightline Wholesale Supply, a company in Columbus, Ohio, that buys goods in large amounts and sells them to stores. Its accounting team pays the bills, called invoices, that its suppliers send. Every Friday the team decides which invoices to pay that week. This weekly set of payments is called the payment run. The invoices are kept in a folder named Invoices. The team follows a written payment policy: its rules for which bills to pay. The team also has a checking program that adds up this week's invoices to the cent. This week, the folder holds 15 unpaid invoices.

Here is that job, handed to an AI Worker in one message. A message like this is called a brief. In it, "pay" means pay this week, "hold" means wait, and "ask" means a person must decide.

Prepare this Friday's payment run from the Invoices folder. Follow version 3 of our payment policy, not the old version 2. You are done when every invoice due in the next seven days is marked pay, hold or ask. Return a spreadsheet with one row per invoice, showing the decision and the policy rule you used. Your invoice total must match the checking program's total. Mark these invoices "ask": invoices from a new supplier, invoices large enough to need a manager's approval, and invoices with changed bank details, because thieves often send fake new bank details to steal payments. Only suggest. Never approve or send a payment. Show what you checked and what the checks found.

This short brief has four parts. Every good brief in this book has them, and Chapter 5 teaches each one.

We call the test inside the outcome the done-when, short for "the job is done when". It is a test the worker can apply to its own work, so it knows when to stop. But you still check the total yourself, with a program you trust, like the checking program.

What comes back is not just an answer. It is finished work: a spreadsheet of decisions, a short note on the checks the worker ran and what they found, and a list of invoices marked "ask" for a person to decide.

This book teaches what you do next. You look at the checking program's result yourself. You do not just trust what the worker says about it. You decide the "ask" invoices yourself. Then a different person, the one in charge of payments, makes the payments. This person uses a payment system that blocks the AI Worker. Even if the worker tried to pay, the system would say no.

One more idea before the figure. The brief tells the worker what it should do. Permissions decide what it is able to do. They are the settings and systems that allow some actions and block others, such as sending a payment.

Read the figure from left to right. You start the job with the brief, and you check what comes back. The worker's part is in the middle, and another person, the payment officer, makes the payment. You can also watch and add instructions while the worker is busy, and it may stop to ask you a question or to wait for your OK.