At a recent conference on AI and the future of work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, experts concluded that technology “both creates and destroys jobs,” that labor productivity growth has actually slowed despite technological advances, and that to realize the benefits of automation, we will need to reinvent organizations, institutions, and metrics.¹ Technologies like self-driving cars, chatbots, automated parking lot attendants, and robotic home caregivers are enticing and attention grabbing, but experts say that the pivotal factor in realizing their value is increasingly how leaders optimize the combinations of human and automated work, and then organize and lead to support those combinations.

Part One describes our four-step framework for achieving that optimization. Each chapter describes a vital component of the framework. Then, chapter 4 pulls them all together to show their combined ability to reveal new and more optimal solutions. Every chapter uses actual examples to show how you can better reach your strategic goals by focusing more clearly on work-automation optimization.

To show how the four steps of our framework build on each other, each of the first four chapters begins with a vignette that continues the story of the automatic teller machine (ATM) that we opened with in the introduction. Each chapter relates a new facet of the ATM story and illustrates the ideas that you will see in that particular chapter.