AI and Useless Tasks

If I use AI to turn a single bullet point into a long email I can pretend I wrote, and you, as the recipient of that way-too-long email, use AI to turn it back into a single bullet point, how productive was the use of AI in that scenario?

(Hat tip for the joke to Tom Fishburne: AI Written, AI Read cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne)

In this scenario, AI indeed saved me the time to write a long email, and it saved you the time to summarize it. 10 minutes of writing for me, 5 minutes of summarizing for you, a total of 15 minutes of human time saved. Hooray! Multiplied over the dozens of emails we send and receive each day, the potential savings are huge.

Or I could just have sent you the single bullet point in the first place.

Maybe this exact example is a tad contrived. Fair. But how many business processes that look like prime candidates for AI automation shouldn't even exist in the first place? I like the vision of AI taming bureaucracy and reclaiming our time for the things that matter and that we're good at. But before you go through the expensive process of developing such an AI solution, ask yourself if you couldn't just get rid of (or at least vastly simplify) the process entirely.