Efficiency Is the Wrong Goal for Land Document Work

Efficiency Is the Wrong Goal

EAG founder Elizabeth Gerbel argues the real opportunity in land operations isn’t doing the same work faster, it’s freeing people to do the work only they can do.

When EAG’s founder and CEO Elizabeth Gerbel talks about artificial intelligence (AI), she doesn’t lead with the technology. She leads with a distinction most companies get wrong.

Her point is not that efficiency is worthless, it’s that it’s the wrong finish line. You can make almost any process faster without changing what actually matters: whether people are spending their time on the parts of the job that require their judgment.

It’s a counterintuitive place to start for a company that builds AI-powered document software. But Gerbel’s argument is that efficiency, doing the same work faster, is the wrong frame entirely. The real opportunity isn’t shaving seconds off a workflow. It’s freeing experienced land professionals from administrative work that has nothing to do with their expertise, so they can spend that time on judgment, analysis, and the decisions only a person can make.

That distinction has shaped how EAG approaches land document work, from the outsourcing side of the business to nuEra AI Land Studio, the company’s AI platform. In a sit down interview with EAG’s Mary Holcomb, Gerbel spoke about what gets lost when analysis time gets squeezed, what an acquisition reveals about a company’s real capacity, and why she believes land expertise becomes more valuable, not less, as automation takes on more of the process.

Mary Holcomb (MH): What is the business actually losing when an experienced land professional spends a significant part of the week reading, organizing, classifying and keying information from documents?

Elizabeth Gerbel (EG): The business is losing that analysis time. What I see a lot of is folks having to squish as much of that analysis time into their day as possible. If we can offload that administrative activity, the activity where technology can really step in and be 80% to 90% plus accurate, that leaves the freedom to focus on the value-add and really help the business grow and address concerns, which could lead to lawsuits that can create risks for the organization, and help the company address those more effectively.

MH: How should a land director or executive determine whether a document problem has become a capacity problem rather than a simple workflow inconvenience?

EG: If you have a few clicks and it takes a few seconds, that’s an annoying workflow issue, and of course you want to have as few clicks as possible because that is still wasting time when extrapolated out across people’s days and weeks and years. But when you really have a capacity problem is when you have a big backlog that builds up and you’re bringing in external team members to fill and support roles on a regular basis. That tells you there should be a better way to get the work done, so that you’re not having to contract out on a regular basis.

Illustration titled "When Volume Hits, Capacity Shows," showing a flood of documents and folders pouring into an overloaded stack marked with a warning icon, then emerging as an organized, resolved stack — depicting how a spike in document work exposes capacity problems.

MH: You’ve described acquisitions as an ‘avalanche’ for already-lean teams. What does an acquisition reveal about a company’s existing processes that might stay hidden during business as usual?

EG: When you receive all of these documents as part of an acquisition, that’s when you really see how much throughput capacity your organization has. In normal day-to-day, you might have people working overtime, or bringing in contractors to help out to keep things moving forward.

But when you receive 100,000 [or] 400,000 [or] a million documents, you really can see that you’re having issues with your processes, and that you may have opportunities to optimize things.

“When you receive 100,000, 400,000, a million documents, you really can see that you’re having issues with your processes.”- ELIZABETH GERBEL, Founder & CEO, EAG

MH: What work should companies continue paying experienced land professionals to do, and what work should technology take off their plates?

EG: Technology has only come so far, and I would say you want to identify the very repeatable activities and put technology to work there. Where you don’t want it making decisions is around areas of risk for the company, or things that move your business model forward.

The AI solutions still hallucinate. They still make up answers. They still pull in information that’s not relevant, and so where you want your team focused is on doing that analysis, making decisions, and being there to really back up those decisions. If you end up having a lawsuit, they’re the ones who can stand up and say, “Here is why we made that decision. Here is the backup information. Here is all the analysis.”

Diagram titled "Automate the Repeatable, Keep the Judgment," showing incoming documents moving through classify, extract, organize, and export steps, with higher-risk items routed to expert review, feeding clean document work into reports, maps, and clean data outputs.

MH: Why do you believe industry expertise becomes more important, not less, as AI improves?

EG: I talk about AI as having high EQ, but it doesn’t have high street smarts. So, from a business perspective, you don’t want it making key business decisions on your behalf. You want to build AI agents so that they do very clear tasks, but you don’t want them to interpret things in a way that could negatively impact your business.

At the end of the day, you need someone who thoroughly understands why decisions were made, why calculations were done a certain way, why provisions were interpreted the way they were, because there are outside forces, regulatory agencies, owners, lawyers, that are going to need answers to those questions. They’re not going to want to hear that from an AI bot. They’re going to want to hear that from a person who has a full understanding of the asset, the information around it, and the regulatory requirements associated with where that asset exists.

“I talk about AI as having high EQ, but it doesn’t have high street smarts.”- ELIZABETH GERBEL, Founder & CEO, EAG

MH: What would you say to an executive who pushes back and says, “Our team has always handled it manually, and it works,” but agrees there is a problem?

EG: I would say pick a part of the process that everyone feels comfortable can be automated. Test it, go through it for a few months, and track the results. That will start creating comfort with the incorporation of technology, and it’ll also start creating ideas on where technology could be incorporated in other ways and in other areas. Those types of proof-of-concept, proof-of-value projects really can start building towards a more comprehensive usage of the tools that are available today.

MH: If you were sitting with an energy executive tomorrow who knows their team is buried in document work but doesn’t know where to start, what would you tell them to do first?

EG: I think the first thing I would do is find someone who really enjoys processes and documenting processes and have that person facilitate an exercise where you take a simple process, break it down into its components, and determine where technology fits and where it doesn’t. That person needs to be an advocate for the technology and not focus on the exceptions; exceptions will always need human intervention. We’re looking at where technology can fit in and accomplish 80% of the work.

I also think people tend to boil the ocean, trying to attack too many processes at once. I would take a single bite, get that working, then take another bite, get that working, rather than trying to do too many things at once.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.