“Always check AI.”
While it is sensible advice, as AI becomes embedded in more complex workplace tasks, it is no longer enough.
What does checking actually mean in practise? If AI drafts an email, reviewing it is relatively straightforward. But what if AI analyses hundreds of pages of information, identifies risks, recommends a course of action or completes several steps in a workflow?
A human may technically remain “in the loop” while having little realistic capacity to verify everything the system has done, making supervising AI a new workplace skill.
Effective supervision starts long before the output appears. Employees need to know what:
- information AI is working from,
- assumptions it may be making
- matters most in the task
- errors may have serious consequences.
Next, the checking needs to match the risk.
A low-stakes internal summary may require a quick sense-check whereas a recommendation affecting money, people, safety, legal obligations or reputation demands much stronger verification.
Organisations also need to stop treating human oversight as a magic safety switch, as a harried employee hastily clicking “approve” does not equal meaningful oversight.
Good AI supervision should include:
- checking source material
- testing important claims
- comparing outputs against known facts
- asking AI to expose uncertainty
- requiring human approval at specific points in a workflow.
Most importantly, the human checker needs sufficient knowledge and expertise to recognise when something looks wrong.
Be AI-Wise
As AI becomes more capable, “human in the loop” should not mean “human at the end”. Rather, human judgement should be built into the process from the beginning. Because if nobody understands how to check the checker, human oversight becomes little more than a box-ticking exercise.
Leadership question:
Where does human oversight occur in your AI-enabled workflows – is it genuine verification or simply final approval?
GAPS Professional Writing helps organisations build practical AI capability, strengthen workplace writing and redesign workflows for effective human-AI collaboration. Visit www.gapswriting.com.