Oversight isn’t judgment
Every team running AI agents in their workflow is likely putting some "human-in-the-loop" in the process, and the belief is that this is going to save them in case of AI slop or worse.
The obvious question to ask would be, "how do you check the agent's work?” And that’s a good place to start AFTER you’ve asked a more important question, "how did you decide this was the work worth giving the agent in the first place?"
Teams that are already working this way are, no doubt, building elaborate systems for catching their agents’ mistakes. The decision to automate specific tasks, however, seems to get a lot less attention. It feels like many teams are overlooking this key component to building AI support in their workflows.
Oversight is a QA function
Let's be precise about what oversight actually is. Oversight is the approval gate. It's the human who reads the agent's draft, catches the hallucinated number, fixes the tone, and clicks publish. It's review and it’s quality control.
This work is super important. We’re not handing the bots the keys to everything in our company, and neither should you. When an agent writes the code, a human still has to review and approve it. Oversight keeps the obvious errors out of the world.
But notice what oversight assumes. It assumes the task is already the right task. The agent has been pointed at something, and the only open question is whether it did that something correctly. Oversight operates entirely downstream of a much more important decision. It's a spell-check on a sentence nobody asked whether you should write.
Judgment is a strategy function
Judgment lives one layer up, and it's a completely different muscle. Judgment is the call about which outcomes are worth the agent's effort at all.
Oversight asks, "did the agent do this right?" Judgment asks, "should we have asked the agent to do this in the first place?" The first is a checklist. The second requires a point of view about your customer, your strategy, and the specific change in behavior you're trying to create. One of those you can teach in an afternoon. The other comes from years of doing the actual work.
Your team should be vigilant not to swap one for the other. With oversight you’re really just grading the homework. With judgment you’re making the hard calls about what’s better done by AI vs humans.
Don't settle for oversight theater
I've started calling the swap "oversight theater." It's the performance of human control without the substance of human judgment. It often appears as a wall of approval gates or a dashboard full of green checkmarks all sitting on top of work that was never challenged. The agent gets faster. The thinking gets thinner. And because every output got a human sign-off, everyone feels safe.
The trap is that oversight theater is easy to install and impossible to argue with. Who's against checking the work? But a team that reviews everything and questions nothing will simply arrive at the wrong outcome faster and with more confidence than ever before. That's not safety. That's acceleration toward a place you never chose to go.
Try this approach this week. Before you add another approval step to your agent workflow, go up one level instead. Look at the work you've already handed the agent and ask, out loud, with your team: which outcome is this supposed to move, and how will we know if it did? If nobody can answer in a sentence, you don't have a judgment problem you can fix with more oversight. You have an oversight habit standing in for the judgment you skipped.
Catch the agent's mistakes, by all means. But decide what's worth its effort first. That decision is still yours, it's still hard, and no amount of human-in-the-loop will make it for you.