The fastest way to undermine trust in AI at your company isn't a failed pilot. It's using AI in the wrong situation, getting a bad outcome, and having someone say 'I told you so.' That story spreads. Here are the situations where you should put the AI down.
High-stakes outputs that skip human review
AI is confident even when it's wrong. When the stakes are low — draft a blog post, brainstorm ideas, summarize a meeting — that's fine because a human checks before anything ships. But if someone on your team is making a significant decision (a vendor contract, a legal interpretation, a financial projection) and feeding AI output directly into it without review, you have a governance problem. The answer isn't 'don't use AI.' It's 'build a review step.'
Conversations that require genuine human presence
Handling a complaint from your most loyal customer who just had a terrible experience? Don't outsource the first response to AI. Delivering difficult news to an employee? Same. There are moments where someone on the other side needs to feel heard by an actual person, and AI-generated empathy tends to land as hollow even when it reads well. Use AI for the before (drafting what to say) and after (summarizing what was said), not the moment itself.
Novel judgment calls with no clear pattern
AI is trained on patterns. When you're in genuinely unprecedented territory — a new market, a regulatory gray area, an unusual customer situation — AI will still produce a confident-sounding answer extrapolated from patterns that don't quite fit. This is when you need human judgment most. Use AI to research context, not to make the call.
The caveat
None of this means avoid AI in complex situations. It means apply it thoughtfully. AI drafting your talking points before a hard conversation is fine. AI delivering that conversation is not. The distinction is between AI as preparation and AI as execution.
The practical rule: if a bad AI output would be embarrassing but recoverable, proceed with review. If it would be damaging or irreversible, keep a human in the loop before anything leaves the building.