When to Use AI, and When Not To

An AI assistant connected to Agility can find, draft, translate and update content quickly. That doesn't mean it should do everything. This guide helps you decide which jobs suit an assistant, which need a person, and how much of the work the assistant should do on its own.

For how to connect an assistant, see Using AI Assistants with Agility CMS. For how to word requests, see How to Write Good Requests to an AI Assistant in Agility.

Five questions to ask first

Before you hand a job to an assistant, ask:

1. Can the result be checked quickly? A meta description's length and accuracy are easy to check. Whether a paragraph of legal wording is correct is not.
2. What happens if it's wrong? A weak alt text is easy to fix. A wrong price, a misquoted customer or an incorrect safety instruction can do real harm.
3. Does it need facts the assistant doesn't have? The assistant only knows what's in the items it reads and what you tell it. If the job needs knowledge that isn't written down in Agility, it will either ask or guess.
4. Does it need someone to be accountable? Some content needs a named person to stand behind it: legal terms, regulated claims, official statements.
5. Is it repetitive? Assistants are most useful on jobs that are the same small task many times over, where a person would get tired and make mistakes.

The more answers point to "easy to check, low impact, repetitive", the better the fit.

Good fits

• Finding and auditing. Listing items with empty fields, images without alt text, stale content or links to pages that no longer exist. Read-only work changes nothing, so the risk is low. See Audit Your Content with AI.
• Filling gaps in bulk. Drafting missing SEO titles and descriptions from each page's own content. See Fill In Missing SEO Titles and Descriptions with AI.
• First drafts of translations, for a fluent reviewer to check. See Draft Translations for Another Locale with AI.
• Summaries and short descriptions written from content that already exists.
• Consistent, mechanical edits. Correcting the spelling of a product name everywhere, or applying a style rule across a list.
• Second opinions. Asking for a plainer version of a paragraph, or checking a draft against your style rules, while you stay the author.

Poor fits

• Legal, compliance and regulated content. Terms, privacy notices, financial, medical or safety claims. A person with the right expertise writes and approves these. An assistant can, at most, point out inconsistencies for that person to check.
• Prices, dates, specifications and other hard facts that aren't already in the item. The assistant may produce something that sounds right and isn't.
• Statements about real people and customers. Quotes, testimonials, case study results and biographies must come from the source, not be invented or "improved".
• Brand-defining copy. Home page headlines, taglines and positioning. Use an assistant to brainstorm options if you like, but a person decides.
• Sensitive or urgent communications. Incident notices, apologies, announcements about people. Tone and timing matter too much.
• Deleting content. Deleting is a decision about your site, not a writing task. Keep it with a person, who can check what links to the content first.
• Anything you can't review. If nobody on the team can judge whether the output is right, for example a translation into a language nobody reads, the assistant shouldn't be the only check.

Decide how much the assistant does

Agility supports three levels of autonomy for the same assistant. Your organization chooses which applies to each kind of content. See Levels of autonomy in Governing AI Access to Agility CMS.

Level	The assistant	A person	Suits
Assist	Drafts and saves to Staging	Reviews, previews and publishes	New kinds of request, high-visibility content, anything that needs judgment
Approve	Drafts, saves and requests approval	An approver signs off before it's published	Content that already goes through approvals, or where someone else is accountable
Autonomous	Drafts, checks its own work against agreed rules and publishes what passes	Sets the rules, watches the publish log, handles what fails	Repeatable, easy-to-check changes, agreed in advance for that content

Some examples:

Job	Suggested level
Audit for missing alt text or descriptions (read-only)	No change is made, so no publishing decision
Draft missing meta descriptions	Assist to start; Autonomous only once your organization has agreed checks for that content
Draft alt text for images	Assist. The assistant can't always tell what an image means in context
Draft a translation	Assist or Approve, with a fluent reviewer
Correct a known misspelling across a list	Assist, or Autonomous with a check that no other field changed
Edit a product page's pricing or specifications	A person writes it; no assistant drafting
Legal or compliance copy	A person writes and approves it

When in doubt, start at Assist. It is what happens unless you ask for more: the assistant saves to Staging, and nothing reaches your live site until someone publishes it.

Keep publishing a deliberate decision

Saving and publishing are separate steps, and that separation is your main safeguard.

• Saves land in Staging. Review and preview every AI change before it's published, unless your organization has set that content up for autonomous publishing.
• Approvals still apply. If a page or content list requires approval, changes made through an assistant go through the same approval steps. See Approvals and Workflows.
• Publishing takes nested content with it. Publishing a page or content item also publishes its nested linked content by default, including saved changes nobody has reviewed. Review it, or tick Publish this item only in the Publish prompt.
• Your role is the limit. The assistant acts as you. If you can't publish or delete in Agility, it can't either.
• Mistakes can be undone. Unpublish the item, or restore an earlier version from Version History and publish that.

Think about what you share

Anything an assistant reads from Agility, and anything you paste into the conversation, becomes part of that conversation in your AI tool. Use the AI tools your organization has approved, and don't paste information into a request that you wouldn't share with that tool otherwise. Your administrator can tell you which tools are approved. See What leaves Agility.

Signs you should stop and do it yourself

• You've rewritten the request three times and the result still isn't right.
• Checking the output takes longer than doing the job.
• The assistant keeps adding details that aren't in the source.
• The job turns out to need a decision, not a draft.

Related articles

• Using AI Assistants with Agility CMS
• How to Write Good Requests to an AI Assistant in Agility
• Governing AI Access to Agility CMS
• A Content Operations Playbook