The handoff gap.

The summary is clear. The action points look sensible. The meeting has ended.

Who does what next?

That question is easy to overlook when attention is focused on the quality of the generated answer. Yet the answer only becomes useful work when someone can act on it.

A hypothetical meeting workflow

Imagine a team using AI to draft meeting notes. The draft contains proposed actions, but the relevant people work from a task system, not the folder where the summary is saved.

A colleague now has to interpret the notes, confirm the owners, copy the actions across and resolve anything ambiguous. If that step is not defined, work may be duplicated or left unassigned.

The summary may be perfectly serviceable. The handoff is incomplete.

This is an illustrative design problem, not a report of a client result. It is useful because it separates output quality from operational usefulness.

Four things to make explicit

First, identify the recipient. “The team” is often too broad. Who is expected to review or use the result?

Second, state the action. Are they checking a draft, making a decision, updating a record or completing a task? A notification is not necessarily a completed handoff.

Third, define the destination. Where should the approved result live, and what information needs to travel with it? The destination should fit the existing working process unless there is a clear reason to change it.

Fourth, plan for the exception. What happens if the owner is missing, a proposed action is wrong, or a system cannot accept the update?

Automate only what is defined

It may be appropriate to automate part of the transfer. But automating an ambiguous step can simply make the ambiguity move faster.

In the meeting example, the team might decide that a person approves proposed actions before they become tasks. The system could then support the transfer within the agreed permissions. Responsibility for the approval remains visible.

The right design depends on the consequence of a mistake, the tools in use and the people responsible. There is no universal rule that every AI output should write directly into the next system.

A simple workflow card

Write down the trigger, permitted inputs, expected output, quality check, responsible reviewer, destination and fallback. Add the process owner and the person who maintains any technical connection.

Ask someone outside the original project to explain what happens when the output is incomplete. Their questions can show where the documentation is still relying on knowledge in the builder’s head.

Then test the entire path, including review and correction, not just the moment an answer appears.

The handoff is part of the product. It is also part of the training. People need to understand where a useful output belongs and what they remain responsible for doing with it.

Explore Workflow Design for a focused review of one process and the conditions needed to make it workable.