Human-in-the-loop

Human-in-the-loop means a person reviews or approves an AI's work at the points that matter before it goes live or takes effect. The agent does the heavy lifting, drafts the email, proposes the action, prepares the decision, and you check and confirm. It's the deliberate middle ground between doing everything yourself and letting an agent run fully autonomous.

For a founder this is the default setting for anything with real consequences. You let the AI handle volume and speed while keeping your judgement on the irreversible or high-stakes steps: the message that actually sends, the record that gets deleted, the price that goes out. It matters because it lets you trust an agent gradually, watch where it's reliable, loosen the leash there, and keep tight control where a mistake is costly. The art is putting the human at the few decisive checkpoints, not in front of every routine action where you'd just be a bottleneck.