The Nine Wastes of AI

AI doesn’t remove waste — it just makes it faster, and often moves it somewhere you’re not looking. That’s the trap this episode is built to help you avoid: pointing a powerful agent at a process and accelerating every redundant, wasteful step inside it at machine speed. In this episode, Chris Bradley borrows a seventy-year-old lens from the Toyota Production System and applies it to knowledge work. He walks the seven process wastes — waiting, inventory, handoffs, motion, defects, rework, and overprocessing — grouped into three families: work that waits, work that moves, and work that misfires. For each, he shows the same pattern: automate without redesign, and the agent preserves the waste, then relocates the cost downstream onto whoever has to sift through or correct the output. Then he goes past the classic list. The eighth Lean waste — non-utilized talent — reframes the whole point: AI’s real payoff isn’t speed, it’s reclaiming the judgment and creativity the process had buried. And there’s a ninth the factory never had, because only AI could create it — verification, the new and quietly exhausting labor of checking work that reads exactly like the truth and isn’t. The Lean mnemonic DOWNTIME becomes DOWNTIME-V. He’s specific about how to manage it, including how to use a verification agent to narrow the burden without ever handing over the accountability. The episode closes with the Delete Test — Delete, Collapse, then Automate — the discipline that makes sure you remove waste before you cement it in code, and a Lean practice for spotting it: go to the gemba, the real place the work happens. Two things to try this week are included.