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FIGURE 3-1: A FIRST DECISION TREE FOR CHOOSING A TYPE OF TOOL

What to notice: The first decision concerns the primary verb. Tests of sources, privacy,

language, cost, and oversight come afterwards.
Source: Prepared by the author.

Composite Tasks Need a Chain of Capabilities
In reality not every task belongs to a single pure category. Preparing a monthly report may
begin with extracting figures from files, then computing indicators, then retrieving

definitions from an official manual, then generating an explanation, then sending the file
after approval. The common error is to call the whole chain “writing a report” and choose
one chat model, when each step needs a different mechanism of success.

Break the task into stages, and define for each stage its input, its output, and its means of

verification. You may use optical character recognition, usually abbreviated OCR, to turn the
image of a document into text; code to compute the ratios; retrieval to fetch the rule; a
language model for the drafting; and then human approval before sending. This design does

not always mean technical complexity; even well-organized manual work benefits from
knowing where the system’s role begins and where it ends.

At every transition, ask: is the output free text or fixed fields? Is the data complete? Is there

a unit, a currency, or a date that could be misread? Does the next step need a structure a
program can read? And may the system carry out the action, or should it only propose it?
The answers decide whether you need a structured output, a calculation tool, a log, or an
approval gate.

It also helps to distinguish the user’s task from the system’s capabilities. The user says: I want

to prepare a presentation for a meeting. The system may need retrieval, table extraction,

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