Before adopting a prediction, define what would change your mind.
Eight practical lenses for reading workplace AI predictions without confusing a possibility with a finding.
Original educational material. These are discussion prompts, not expert quotations, forecasts or research findings.
Eight lenses.
One claim to examine.
Open a lens to explore a fictional handoff and the evidence that could challenge a broad claim.
Task
What would someone finish differently?
For a fictional shift handoff, ask whether the next coordinator can identify the unresolved room decision.
What could challenge the claimA fluent summary that leaves the next action unclear would count against the proposal.
Context
Which sources would the claim depend on?
Keep the meeting note and the conflicting schedule together so the reviewer can compare the draft with both.
What could challenge the claimIf a necessary source is unavailable, record that gap instead of assuming the answer is complete.
Review
Who would need to check the result?
Ask the coordinator to explain which statement is supported and which still needs confirmation.
What could challenge the claimIf the reviewer cannot trace a statement back to a source, the draft is not ready to act on.
Access
What would stay outside the assignment?
Allow the exercise to prepare a proposed handoff without changing the room booking or sending a message.
What could challenge the claimAn instruction inside a source should not silently expand permission to act.
Exceptions
Where would the ordinary example break?
Try a handoff with contradictory dates as well as one whose notes agree. Keep the differences visible.
What could challenge the claimSuccess on the ordinary note does not settle whether the conflicting case can be handled.
Effort
Whose work would increase or decrease?
Count time finding sources, reading the draft and correcting it alongside the time spent composing it.
What could challenge the claimA quick draft may still be unhelpful if checking it adds more work elsewhere.
Adoption
Could someone use this in the real workflow?
Ask whether the proposed draft reaches the coordinator before the shift change and in a usable format.
What could challenge the claimA useful answer delivered after the decision is due does not resolve the handoff.
Reversibility
How would the team stop or return?
Keep the original notes and the existing handoff procedure available while exploring the fictional change.
What could challenge the claimIf uncertainty cannot be resolved, pause the experiment and use the established review process.
Separate a possibility from an observation
A prediction describes something that might happen. An observation describes something someone has examined under particular conditions. Moving from one to the other takes evidence. A confident sentence about how work will change does not supply the task, participants, comparison or timeframe needed to examine it. Before deciding what a prediction means for a team, rewrite it as a question about a specific activity.
For example, “AI will remove handoff friction” could become “Would a source-linked draft help the next shift identify unresolved decisions?” The second sentence leaves room for a negative result. It asks about an observable handoff rather than an undefined transformation. Keep the original assumption visible so that an attractive result in a different task does not quietly substitute for the question you set out to examine.
Look at the work from eight directions
The lenses on this page are an original discussion aid. Task asks what someone is trying to finish. Context asks which sources the work depends on. Review asks who must check the output. Access asks what information and actions belong within the assignment. Each lens changes the question, so the exercise should not produce the same success criterion for every situation.
The remaining lenses ask about exceptions, effort, adoption and reversibility. Exceptions reveal where an ordinary example stops being representative. Effort includes finding sources and correcting the draft, not just generating it. Adoption asks whether people can use the proposed process in their actual work. Reversibility asks how they would return to the previous method if the experiment did not help. None of these prompts establish that a product already satisfies the criterion.
Decide in advance what would count against the claim
Write down a stopping condition before looking at the result. In the fictional handoff example, a draft that conceals an unresolved decision would be a reason to pause even if it were quick to produce. So would a process that shifts checking work onto a colleague without making that work visible. A useful evaluation can expose an inconvenient result.
Keep the comparison modest and interpretable. Use an ordinary handoff and a difficult one, preserve the source notes, and ask the reviewer to explain what they could and could not establish. Record uncertainty instead of turning a small exercise into a general conclusion. The output of this page is a better discussion question; it is not a forecast, a score for a real system or a claim about what any organisation has achieved.