Expose the Shadow Processes

The fastest way to make AI agents useful in your organization is to map the work that never made it into a system in the first place. On this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas explain why every system leaves work behind, and why that leftover work, sitting in spreadsheets, inboxes, and people's heads, is exactly what has to get mapped before any agentic AI tool can do something real with it.

Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas trace this problem across several real situations. Julia points to visa and mobility tracking, a process that in most organizations sits with a single person and carries legal and personal consequences if a step gets missed. She also describes mapping decades of undocumented process inside her family's chocolate business, using live interviews and AI transcription to pull knowledge out of long-tenured staff and onto paper for the first time. Jenny Cotie Kangas describes coaching a private insurance adjuster through three weeks of narrating his own judgment calls, work he found tedious, that let his team build an agent system able to label and file a hundred and forty four claim photos in four minutes instead of four to five hours.

The Missing Manual keeps returning to the idea that the tool is never the first problem. Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas point to emerging technology, including audit tools built by Mike Hennessy's Grace Blocks and the experience layer approach from Matt Ekstrom's Sync to Hire, as evidence that more of the industry is waking up to this same gap. Both hosts agree that mapping shadow work is not glamorous, but it is the actual prerequisite for building AI that fits how an organization really operates, rather than forcing every process into a one size fits all system.

This episode continues The Missing Manual's ongoing look at agentic work and AI strategy, the same territory that shapes the show's take on corporate navigation and workplace tactics for anyone building an executive career. Find The Missing Manual wherever you listen to podcasts.