When teams imagine AI agents, they often picture full autonomy: the agent handles everything and nobody needs to look. In practice, the agents that earn trust are designed around a handoff, the precise point where a person takes over.
Design the handoff first
Before building anything, we ask where judgment, approval, or a relationship enters the workflow. That's where the agent stops. Everything before that point (gathering, reading, sorting, drafting) is fair game.
Make the handoff useful
A handoff is only as good as what arrives with it. A useful one includes:
- A short summary of what happened and why it was flagged.
- The options the agent considered, ranked, with its reasoning.
- Links to the source records, so a person can verify in one click.
Log everything
Every action an agent takes should be recorded and reviewable. Logs make agents auditable, make errors easy to trace, and give your team the evidence to expand what the agent may do over time.
Widen the lane gradually
Start with the agent recommending and a person approving. As accuracy is proven on real work, let it act on low-risk cases automatically while anything unusual still goes to a person. Autonomy becomes something the agent earns, not something it gets on day one.