The Verification Quadrant
Based on the Templeton Ratio™
Before automating a task with AI, ask two questions: How hard is it to do? and How hard is it to check? The ratio between these two numbers - the Templeton Ratio - determines whether AI will save you time or double it.
Drag the dot in the chart, or open Customize below for sliders.
The Templeton Ratio
AI value isn't determined by how impressive the output looks. It is determined by one number: how much cheaper it is to check than to produce.
The Verification Quadrant maps the two components of this ratio. Tasks in the AI Sweet Spot have high T - hard to calculate, easy to verify. This is the P vs NP intuition applied to operations. Generating a solution is expensive but checking it is cheap, and that asymmetry is where automation creates leverage.
The Verification Trap kills more AI pilots than technical failure. The task looks automatable because generation is easy. But "is this output correct?" requires human judgment that scales linearly with volume. T approaches 1. You end up paying for generation and review instead of just doing the work once.
How to Score a Task
Calculation Difficulty
How hard is it for a human to produce correct output?
Verification Difficulty
How hard is it to determine whether the output is correct?
Decision Rules
The Capital Value of Verifiers
The quadrant above describes the current state of a task; it is not permanent. Build a verifier and you permanently move the task across the diagram - red into blue, amber into green. And unlike almost every other capital asset, the verifier appreciates through operating use: every failure caught is encoded, and the next run inherits the catch.
Read the framework: investment math, what counts as a verifier, fail conditions, and why this is the highest-leverage move in an AI operating budget →
When to Use This
Use when
- +Triaging a backlog of AI candidates and you need to sort them fast
- +Deciding whether the capital investment is the generator or the verifier
- +Engineering and business need a shared vocabulary for what is hard
- +You want a quick visual before doing the heavier Automation NPV work
Skip when
- -You need a single number - compute the Templeton Ratio directly
- -The task is fully deterministic and no AI is involved
- -Both axes are already well understood and the team just needs to ship
- -You are past categorization and into execution (use the Promotion Protocol)
Rosetta Stone
Four circles, four readings of the same object. Each role reads the artifact through its own lens.
A pre-investment underwriting map. The upper-right cell (generation hard, verification cheap) is where deployed capital earns return; the lower-left is a trap dressed as progress.
A placement test for any task the team might automate. Plot it before the vendor demo. If the task isn't in "automate now," walk.
A build-vs-decline map. Generation hard plus verification cheap equals build. Anything else, you're shipping infrastructure that hasn't earned its keep.
A partition of task space along two orthogonal cost axes. Each cell implies a distinct optimal policy. Quadrant-shifting is the capex operation that changes cell membership.