Job Design Visualizer for “Chaining Tasks, Redefining Work: A Theory of AI Automation”
Each step is executed as Manual, Automated, or Augmented.
A Manual step becomes a manual task; an Augmented step, alone or preceded by Automated steps, forms one AI chain task.
Given the task sequence from Stage 1, tasks are partitioned into jobs (one worker per job).
Each job boundary incurs a hand-off cost determined by the final step of that job.
Each step has a skill cost and a time cost for each mode of human (cMi, tMi) or AI-assisted (cAi, tAi) execution. These costs for AI-automated execution are zero. di is the step's difficulty for AI; combined with the global AI quality α, it yields the success probability qi = αdi. Finally, tHi is the (potential) hand-off time cost between workers.
The solver minimizes the firm's cost minimization problem, denoted in Equation (3) in the paper.
| Step | cMi ($) | tMi | cAi ($) | tAi | di | tHi | Mode |
|---|
Each Manual step becomes a manual task with its (cM, tM); an Augmented step, alone or preceded by Automated steps, forms one AI chain task whose skill and time costs are the augmented step's (cA, tA) and whose success probability q is the product of the constituent steps' q values. the hand-off cost tH is inherited from the task's last step.
| Task | c ($) | t | q | tH | Type |
|---|
Each step is a rectangle: width = time, height = skill. Each job's bounding box has area = wage bill.
Hand-off rectangles appear between non-final jobs.
Automated cells use a diagonal-stripe fill — they contribute zero direct cost.
Each task is a rectangle: width = time, height = skill. Each job's bounding box has area = wage bill.
Hand-off rectangles appear between non-final jobs.
Each job is a rectangle: width = time, height = skill. Each job's bounding box has area = wage bill.
Gains from improving AI quality α are non-linear. Each time a re-design threshold is passed the optimal configuration of production changes.
Per-job wage bills under the cost-minimizing design. The total cost equals the sum of the wage bills across all jobs.
| Job | Steps | Tasks | Σ cb ($) | Σ tb (time) | tH(Jj) | Wage Bill ($) |
|---|