Human-in-the-Loop
Human-in-the-Loop: Your Quality Standard
AI should increase your leverage, not reduce your standards.
Rule 1: You own the decisions
AI prepares options. You decide.
Never delegate:
- Strategic tradeoffs.
- Relationship-sensitive communication.
- Risk acceptance.
- Final approvals.
Rule 2: Match verification depth to impact
| Impact Level | Verification |
|---|---|
| Low (internal notes, routine formatting) | Quick skim for obvious errors |
| Medium (team communications, standard reports) | Fact check key claims, verify logic |
| High (client-facing, financial, legal, public) | Full source verification, stakeholder review |
Higher consequence means deeper review. Always.
Rule 3: Require the agent to separate facts from interpretation
Train your workflows to label output clearly:
- Facts: What the data actually says.
- Interpretation: What the agent thinks it means.
- Recommendations: What the agent suggests you do.
This prevents confident-sounding guesses from being treated as truth.
Rule 4: Protect sensitive information
Set clear boundaries for:
- Personal data (employee, customer, patient).
- Confidential business information.
- Legal and financial material.
- Internal strategy.
When sensitivity is high, minimize data exposure and add explicit review checkpoints.
Rule 5: Build in exception handling
Not everything fits a template. Design your workflows with clear rules for what happens when:
- Data is missing or incomplete.
- Signals conflict with each other.
- The agent's confidence is low.
- A situation does not match any of your defined rules.
The default behavior should be: stop and ask the human.
Rule 6: Review your systems weekly
Every week, spend 15 minutes asking:
- What did this system save me?
- Where did it fail or produce weak output?
- What noise is still leaking through?
- What decisions became clearer because of it?
- What one thing should I refine this week?
Good systems improve through iteration. A system you never revisit eventually degrades.