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Every product a company makes has a bill of materials: every part, its cost, its supplier. The company that makes those products has no equivalent document for the work its people do. This weekend edition is about that missing document, the bill of work, why almost nobody has one, and how to build one for a single department in about three weeks.
Nobody has done the counting: the Census Bureau finds 85 percent of US firms using generative AI use it for writing and editing, and nearly 65 percent confine it to three tasks or fewer. More than seven thousand annual reports filed with the SEC since January 2025 mention AI; one states a cost per task.
In this episode, Stephen Forte covers:
- The bill of materials, and the teardown. Munro and Associates in Auburn Hills, Michigan, takes a competitor's car to pieces and prices every part at plus or minus eight percent. There are two kinds of teardown; the second kind points inward.
- Why the org chart cannot see it. A map of authority, not a map of work. One task wearing three costumes, each five percent of someone's week, each correctly filed as a rounding error by its own department.
- The lens. The unit of AI is the task family, not the department. Organized by department, bought by the person, measured by headcount, becomes the task family, the completed task, cost per completion.
- Five steps to a bill of work. Take one department apart on cards. Sort by shape, not owner (the illustrative five accountants: eight shapes, eight shared agents). Cost the biggest pile three ways, including what is queued behind it. One agent, owned by the person who knows the work, baseline written first, ninety days. Decide what the freed capacity is for before it exists.
- Why the number is capacity, not cash. Danish payroll data: workers report saving about three percent of hours; hours and earnings do not move. The three conversions: velocity, growth not hired for, consolidation through attrition.
- The honest section. The US General Services Administration published 240,000 hours reclaimed; its own Inspector General found nine of the ten biggest bots off their forecasts and two credited with 15,000 hours after being switched off. Goldratt's constraint objection, amended, not repealed. Why "pick three workflows" and "map everything" both miss the pile.
- The question. If someone handed you a price list on Monday for the ten most common tasks in your company, could you tell whether it was a good price? Do you know which ten they are?
A note on the arithmetic: the five accountants are illustrative and are said so on air; every other figure is from a primary source listed below. The Swedish payments firm is one filing, not a case study.
Sources:
- US Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies working paper CES-WP-26-25 (April 2026), generative AI use by task among US firms.
- SEC EDGAR full-text search, 10-K and 20-F filings mentioning artificial intelligence, 1 January 2025 to 12 September 2026; Klarna Form 20-F for fiscal 2025.
- Kaplan and Anderson, Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing, Harvard Business Review, November 2004.
- Humlum and Vestergaard, NBER Working Paper 33777 (revised March 2026), large language models and labor market outcomes in Denmark.
- US General Services Administration, Office of Inspector General, report A210057/B/5/F24001, 30 November 2023.
- Goldratt, The Goal (1984); C.H. Robinson second-quarter 2026 results; Munro and Associates published teardown reports.
The AI Brief from the YPO Technology Network is a daily executive briefing on the AI developments that matter to business leaders. Hosted by Stephen Forte.
