How do I build AI workflows that my team will actually use?
- Claire Baker
- Dec 31, 2025
- 2 min read
“Help people arrive, not perform.”
The problem with bad workflows is that they’re built for people’s best days, not their worst.
But people are flawed.
At work, they’re busy,
stressed,
only half paying attention,
and in a hurry to get to the next thing.
If you build a workflow that requires more than half of their brain, they’re going to mess up.
The best workflows can be done while driving
in the 2-minute gaps between chat support responses
from the corner of the couch with Dora the Explorer playing at top volume in the background.
I took this picture from Claude Silver’s talk at the Responsibly Human AI conference in San Francisco because it perfectly captured how to create a successful workflow – AI or otherwise.
Here's what I took away:
🤗 Help people arrive, not perform
You hired smart people who can make sound decisions, as long as you give them the right information.
Your workflow’s job is to give them that information.
Processes fail when people know “what” they want to do, but can’t figure out the “how.”
Your workflow should make it easy for them to use their own judgment by automatically serving up the tools they need along the way.
🚚 Design for capacity, not output
When people are in a rush, they make mistakes that cost time and money.
You don’t want to create processes that cut the time-to-production in half if half of the output sucks.
Instead, create processes that make it as easy as possible to get to the right output every time.
If everyone forgets to save the file to Google Drive, don’t set up an automatic alert. Focus on automating “save to Google Drive,” or build a process where they must pass through Google Drive to move on to the next step.
🚉 Set guide rails, not guard rails
Most people set guardrails to prevent the things they don’t want. But people find their way around guardrails that block them from their goals.
Instead, set guide rails that help people stay on the path you want them to take.
When you know the path, you also know where to plant the resources and signposts along the way that make it easier to do things the “right” way.
If you focus all of your processes to bring out people’s best, even when they’re at their worst, you’ll build a business that scales.
Otherwise, you won’t have a business full of subject matter experts. You’ll have a business full of experts in your weird workflows.
Are you investing in AI tools but your team is still using a spreadsheet?
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