Keep the human in the loop on purpose

Full automation is a tempting headline and usually the wrong target. The goal was never to remove the person. It was to give the person the right work and the system the rest.

A design choice, not a weakness

Keeping a human in the loop is often treated as an admission that the model is not good enough yet. Sometimes that is true. More often it is a deliberate design, because the cost of a rare mistake is high and a person reviewing the uncertain cases is cheap insurance.

Where to place the person

• On the exceptions. Let the system handle the confident majority and route the uncertain minority to a human.
• On the irreversible. Anything that is hard to undo deserves a person before it commits.
• On the rare and expensive. Low volume, high stakes is exactly where human judgement earns its keep.

Decide the division of labour on purpose, at design time. The worst version is the accidental one, where the system quietly does things no one chose for it to own.