Ten stages: eight transactional, bookended by two strategic — 00 Category Strategy before the need and 09 Value Realisation after the signature. For each, the line marks what AI can and should do and where a named human must sign — but it is not fixed. It moves with that stage's own maturity and the risk of the buy, and every stage carries a failure mode and a live calibration read.
Scope. Indirect and services spend — the categories most teams struggle to control. Direct/production spend follows the same line logic with its own channel set; noted where it diverges.
Autonomy is not a property of a stage — it's a property of how mature you are at that stage. Most teams are uneven: advanced at payment, foundational at sourcing. Set each stage from its own diagnostic (inside the stage); risk applies to the whole buy and shifts every stage at once.
Risk profile of the buy — applies across all stagesChannel differentiation keeps everything downstream proportionate. Pick a buying channel to see which stages collapse; pick a payment channel to set the disbursement gate. The principle: make the compliant path the quickest path.
The eight transactional stages (01–08) are bookended by two strategic ones — 00 before the need, 09 after the signature — so the line governs the whole value cycle. Two backbones run continuously beneath all ten; without them, every autonomy level above is borrowed against trust you don't have.
Open a stage for its maturity diagnostic, the advanced target state, the line computation, and what happens when the agent is wrong.
The control map — recomputed against each stage's maturity and your current risk. Read down a column for how much of a channel can run autonomously; read across a row for where a stage tightens. Dashed cells are pre-cleared upstream. The badge by each stage is its maturity level.
Where autonomy and irreversibility collide. Matched, in-tolerance transactions clear themselves; disbursement release and supplier bank-detail changes never do.
Push everything routine to the agent and your people only ever see exceptions — and a reviewer who's lost the business context can't judge the one in front of them. Keep humans close to live deals and embedded with the business, or "human oversight" decays into rubber-stamping. The dividend only pays if you reinvest it here.
AI takes the analysis, drafting, matching, monitoring and routing — high volume, rule-bound, reversible. The human keeps the need, the award, the signature, the disbursement and the exception — anything that commits the firm, accepts liability, or can't be undone. And oversight attaches to the reasoning — the data inputs, the scoring logic, the confidence — not only the final signature.
How the AI Augmentation Line™ methodology maps to Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, and what this tool is and is not.