Wei Chen - Who Owns the Workflow? The Organizational Problem AI Actually Exposes

Wei Chen is an Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut School of Business and co-leader of the Digital Frontiers Initiative. Over the last three years he's made generative AI his mission — graduate courses, executive workshops, a textbook, and now a business novel modeled after The Goal and The Phoenix Project, set inside an insurance company.His central argument: every serious conversation about AI and the workforce stops at the task level — which tasks AI can automate, which jobs are at risk. But tasks are only the bottom tier. The level that actually determines whether AI transforms an organization is the workflow: the connected chain of tasks that produces a business outcome. And the piece nobody's building is ownership — a named human who's accountable for the whole workflow, with the authority to stop it when something goes wrong.The conversation covers Wei's TWO framework (Task, Workflow, Owner), the "validation tax" that turns AI adoption into theater, an Illinois regulatory compliance failure that illustrates exactly what breaks when no one owns the workflow, and why the only approach that works for high-stakes industries like insurance is one workflow at a time — not replacing all four jet engines at once.