---
id: "concept-ai-augmentation-strategy-d9"
type: "concept"
source_timestamps: ["§ 1. Develop your AI augmentation strategy"]
tags: ["strategy", "value-creation", "automation"]
related: ["concept-humane-imperative", "claim-job-loss-to-humans", "action-redefine-human-value", "framework-5-ways-ai-collaboration", "concept-intellectual-microwave", "concept-intellectual-slow-food"]
definition: "A strategic plan defining how employees will add unique, non-commoditized value after delegating repetitive and automatable tasks to artificial intelligence."
sources: ["adoption"]
sourceVaultSlug: "hbr-seg-adoption"
originDay: 9
articleStem: "hbr-edu-36-team-collaborate-with-ai"
sourceUrl: "https://hbr.org/2024/11/set-your-team-up-to-collaborate-with-ai-successfully"
sourceTitle: "Set Your Team Up to Collaborate with AI Successfully"
---
# AI Augmentation Strategy

An **AI augmentation strategy** is a deliberate organizational plan that answers a fundamental question: *how will employees add new, unique value after they leverage the time and efficiency savings provided by AI?* The core premise is that whatever AI can automate should be automated — but as a direct consequence, those automated tasks become **devalued and commoditized**. The strategic onus therefore shifts to what human talent can produce *on top of* that baseline.

Concrete example from the source: if AI saves a recruiter **40% of their time** by automating resume keyword searches and fixing typos, the augmentation strategy dictates that the recruiter must reinvest that reclaimed time into high-value 'humane' activities — aligning a candidate's potential with their career choices, or helping clients understand their true hiring needs. See [[concept-humane-imperative]] for why these relational skills become the differentiator.

The strategy requires a proactive assessment of how roles will change and what new skills must be deployed to maximize AI's value rather than merely relying on its baseline output. This is why the associated task is to [[action-redefine-human-value]], and why the central competitive claim is that [[claim-job-loss-to-humans]] — the threat is another human using AI, not the AI itself. It is the **first pillar** of the [[framework-5-ways-ai-collaboration]].

The quality dimension of the strategy is captured by the [[concept-intellectual-microwave]] / [[concept-intellectual-slow-food]] pairing: augmentation is not copy-pasting raw AI output, but elevating it with human curation.

**Enrichment context:** This maps directly onto Stanford HAI's automation-vs-augmentation distinction (drawing on Erik Brynjolfsson's 'Turing Trap'), IBM's 'age of the augmented workforce' (redesigning roles and operating models around human–machine partnership), and Deloitte's 2025 Human Capital guidance on sharing AI-created rewards with workers. Academic human–AI value-cocreation typologies formalize the same substitution-vs-complementarity split. Practically, an AI augmentation strategy is a form of **structured job crafting** around AI tools.


## Related across articles
- [[concept-augmentation-vs-automation]]
- [[concept-workflow-redesign]]