The shovel and the flathead

When an automation cannot do something, the constraint is one of three kinds, and the response differs completely.

Capability. It cannot perform the operation. This is the constraint everybody assumes and the one that improves on its own as tools improve. Digging with a screwdriver is a capability problem and a shovel fixes it.

Permission. It could perform the operation and is not allowed to: no access, no authority, no approval to act unattended. This is organizational and no tool resolves it. A great deal of automation that is described as technically blocked is actually waiting on a permission nobody has asked for.

Context. It could perform the operation and is not being told enough to do it correctly. The information exists in the organization and is not available at the point of execution: it is in somebody's head, in an email, or in a system nobody connected.

Misdiagnosis is expensive in a specific direction. Context problems are routinely treated as capability problems, which produces a cycle of increasingly powerful tools applied to an information gap, each performing worse than expected for reasons nobody can name.

The test: if a competent person were given exactly what the system is given, and nothing else, could they do it correctly? If yes, it is capability. If no, it is context, and no tool will close it.