I drew this week’s cartoon inspired by some of the latest growing pains of human-AI collaboration.
As AI gets more autonomous, the traditional “human in the loop” oversight model is showing strain. With pressure to “10X productivity” with fleets of AI agents, how best to keep up with the avalanche and complexity of approvals?
The “human in the loop” risks becoming a tick box exercise, rather than genuine oversight.
Julia Zarb, founder of Blue x Blue, recently illustrated the problem in high stakes healthcare:
“Consider the busy clinician, nurse or manager asked to make a call quickly with partial context … under pressure, review can become a screen-level action rather than an informed decision.”
That AI approval bottleneck is surfacing challenge in every domain, including customer experience.
Connext released a Global AI Oversight Survey last month that found only 17% of workers believe AI is reliable without human oversight, 64% expect the need for human review to increase, and 20% said AI made customer situations worse.
The Financial Times profiled Amazon’s growing pains a few weeks ago with major website service outages caused by AI-generated code. Amazon now plans for additional human oversight.
The “human in the loop” model is hard-pressed to keep up with modern AI systems at the current speed, scale, and complexity. Organizations are experimenting with a shift from “human in the loop” to “human on the loop” (more hands-off) but it will be a bumpy ride.
And when AI makes mistakes, customers tend to blame the company, not the algorithm.
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
