The working hypothesis
AI may make individual tasks faster without creating organization-wide progress if handoffs, priorities, and capacity allocation remain unchanged.
Our distinction
Headroom means capacity released. Headway means measurable progress created from it. This distinction is a working R&K concept, not a validated causal model.
A practical response
Identify a task, establish current time and quality, and test AI assistance with appropriate permissions and human review. Then decide how any time released will be used—such as development, customer response, or reducing a backlog.
What could challenge the hypothesis
The apparent gain may disappear when review and rework are included. Workload may expand, the bottleneck may sit elsewhere, or quality may decline. The task may also create direct value without broader redesign. Evaluate those alternatives.
What to measure
Track net time after review, quality, adoption, and the actual result of reallocating capacity. Do not equate estimated time savings with cash savings or new revenue.
Emerging hypothesis and proposed application. No general AI productivity effect or R&K intervention result is asserted here.