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Was This Done with AI?

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Luis Branco CEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, Ldª Carcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal

As AI becomes embedded in everyday work, “Was this done with AI?” may become a less useful question.

For the audience, the method may matter less than the work itself. Is it useful? Credible? Does it create value?

For the organizations, however, how the work was produced may matter more, not less.

The less visible AI becomes in the final output, the more important the governability of the process behind it may become.

Organizations cannot ask only:

Is the output good?

They must also ask:

Can we legitimately produce it this way?

That raises questions about data, rights, traceability, decision authority and accountability.

So perhaps “Was this done with AI?” is not becoming irrelevant. It is becoming insufficient.

As AI becomes increasingly invisible in the work we produce, what should organizations be asking instead?
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Aaron Porter
Community Champion
IT Director| Blade HQ Payson, UT, United States
- Do we need AI for this? What benefit does it bring?
- What role did AI play?
- What information did it have access to, and was that use appropriate?
- Is the source trustworthy?
- Are the conclusions accurate? How biased are they?
- Who was responsible for validating the work?
- Who had the authority to make the resulting decision or take action?
- Could we reconstruct what happened if the outcome were challenged?
- Does using AI here introduce legal, contractual, regulatory, security, or ethical obligations that doing it another way would not?
...
1 reply by Luis Branco
Aug 28, 2026 10:42 AM
Luis Branco
...
Aaron, absolutely.
I particularly like that your questions move the discussion from whether AI was used to how it participated in producing the work.

I would add one further dimension: intervention.
Knowing who validated the work and who had authority over the resulting decision is essential, but so is knowing who could challenge, override or stop the AI-enabled process while meaningful options still existed.

That becomes especially important as AI moves from generating content to shaping alternatives, recommendations, priorities and actions.
Formal human responsibility may remain unchanged while the actual influence over what becomes visible, plausible or actionable shifts substantially.

For me, governability therefore requires us to follow material influence through the process, not simply identify the human at the end of it.

Perhaps the question connecting many of yours is: can we reconstruct where and how AI materially influenced the process, establish who had legitimate authority and meaningful capacity to intervene, and demonstrate that the process remained governable while intervention still mattered?
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Luis Branco CEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, Ldª Carcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal
Aug 28, 2026 9:57 AM
Replying to Aaron Porter
...
- Do we need AI for this? What benefit does it bring?
- What role did AI play?
- What information did it have access to, and was that use appropriate?
- Is the source trustworthy?
- Are the conclusions accurate? How biased are they?
- Who was responsible for validating the work?
- Who had the authority to make the resulting decision or take action?
- Could we reconstruct what happened if the outcome were challenged?
- Does using AI here introduce legal, contractual, regulatory, security, or ethical obligations that doing it another way would not?
Aaron, absolutely.
I particularly like that your questions move the discussion from whether AI was used to how it participated in producing the work.

I would add one further dimension: intervention.
Knowing who validated the work and who had authority over the resulting decision is essential, but so is knowing who could challenge, override or stop the AI-enabled process while meaningful options still existed.

That becomes especially important as AI moves from generating content to shaping alternatives, recommendations, priorities and actions.
Formal human responsibility may remain unchanged while the actual influence over what becomes visible, plausible or actionable shifts substantially.

For me, governability therefore requires us to follow material influence through the process, not simply identify the human at the end of it.

Perhaps the question connecting many of yours is: can we reconstruct where and how AI materially influenced the process, establish who had legitimate authority and meaningful capacity to intervene, and demonstrate that the process remained governable while intervention still mattered?
avatar
Gregory Marinho Katy, Tx, United States
A key question organization should be asking is whether they have genuinely established the foundations needed to harness AI in a way that produces real value (that aligns with the organization’s purpose, strategic intentions, and overall philosophy)

  • First, are the people adequately prepared to understand the evolving roles of humans and AI? Teams must be clear on what AI should do, what humans must still own, and how the combined contribution of human and AI produces value greater than the sum of each acting alone.

  • Second, how effectively has AI been integrated into the organization’s work processes? AI excels at executing tasks with speed and consistency. What it cannot do is determine which tasks matter most at any given moment or which actions will generate the highest value. That judgment still sits firmly with the human.

  • Finally, does the organization have the right balance of skills and competencies? To generate true value, teams must be able to leverage AI’s strengths while retaining — and continuously developing — the leadership, judgment, strategic thinking, technical depth, and creative capability that transform AI‑generated work into meaningful outcomes.

In summary, organizations need to be asking if they have paid adequate attention to building the right foundations, cultivating the right skills, and ensuring that human leadership remains at the center of value creation in the age of AI.

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