HR Leaders - Valuing Hidden Labor Fixing AI Output

Today's edition of AI Signal sent me down some rabbit holes. One of them was the downstream cost of using AI to increase output. Somewhere in your organization, someone spent an hour this week fixing something that took four minutes to make. How well do you think your organization sees those hours? Values them? The person who generated the draft has output to point to. The person who repaired it has a document that looks exactly the way it was supposed to look. That's the trouble with good repair work. When it's done well, it doesn't leave a visible trace to the end user, and you often have to hunt for it as someone examining a workflow. We've always had these people. The copy editor. The engineer reviewing the pull request. The HR generalist who reads the policy draft and removes a sentence that would have gotten the company sued. Their contribution shows up as things that didn't happen. I don't think most businesses have ever been that good at counting things that didn't happen by design. AI now shifts the ratio. Producing a first draft costs almost nothing. Knowing whether it's right costs what it always did. And I keep coming back to who those people tend to be. The ones with the most context. They remember the last lawsuit, and they know why a clause is worded the way it is. The people you'd most want making decisions are, increasingly, spending their week proofreading for colleagues who got a head start from a tool. So what about the economics in that arrangement? Seems to me that fixers absorb the cost and producers bank the credit. Run that for a few cycles and people figure out which behavior gets rewarded. Then there's a human cost I don't imagine anyone is tracking. Repair work drains you in a particular way. You own the outcome without having authored it, and you're cleaning up after a collaborator that can't be embarrassed because it's your job to sign off on what they're doing. If we're serious about keeping work human, some of the most human work in the building happens in that hour. Judgment. Care. The willingness to stop something that would have been easier to send. I don't know yet how you measure it. I'm fairly sure pretending it isn't there has a cost of its own, and someone is already paying it. Who's doing that hour on your team? Does anyone above them know? I'd love to hear my advice from HR leaders on how you map workflows to see these moments, and how are you valuing them?