MODERN LEVERAGE
//SHIFT: AI  ·  Operationalizing AI
September 18, 2026  ·  Atlanta
Session takeaway

You can delegate the work.
You cannot delegate the standard.

Thanks for being in the room. Everything referenced in the session is below, and none of it asks you for anything first. Start with the worksheet. It is the one thing here you can finish before lunch on Monday.

Roj Reed speaking on the Operationalizing AI panel at the TAG //SHIFT: AI Summit
Panelist, TAG //SHIFT: AI Summit, Atlanta, September 18, 2026

1. Define the tasks

Two pages. The first defines a single AI agent: the tasks it performs, the limits it works within, what it hands back to a person, the check that runs on its work, and the person who owns that work. The second is the leverage test you run across every pilot you already have.

If you cannot fill out page one for a pilot, that pilot is not ready to scale. That is the entire test, and it costs nothing to run.

Download the worksheet (PDF)

2. The definitions we opened with

The two slides from the top of the session, including the survey figures on how much leadership teams actually agree about what an "AI agent" is.

Slide: Ask your leadership team to define AI agent. 69 percent of small-business leaders are confident their leadership shares one definition; 75 percent across all 750 leaders surveyed; 62 percent are already confident handing agents high-stakes work. Slide: An agent takes a goal and works out the steps. It reasons through the work toward the goal you set, acts inside the tools your business already runs on, improves because it keeps your context from one task to the next, and escalates to a human when the work needs one. Defining it is the easy part. The harder questions are what it is for, what it may never do, and who checks its work.

3. If you only do three things

  1. Name what each pilot changed: hours, defects, cycle time, cost per run. A tool that changed nothing is a cost wearing a productivity costume, and being honest about which ones those are is the fastest money you will find this quarter.
  2. Define the tasks for the one carrying weight. What it performs, where its limits are, what it hands back, and who owns the work. If you cannot write that down, it is not ready to scale.
  3. Separate the doer from the checker. Give it one check that runs automatically, rather than a person who remembers to review it.
Written rules are hope. Checks are governance.