Human-in-the-loop means that a person is built into the AI workflow – typically as the one who assesses and approves the machine's output before it has consequences for others.
The principle sounds obvious, but it is quickly challenged by everyday life: when the machine's drafts are almost always good enough, approval slides towards a quick click. That is why it is not enough to place a person in the workflow – that person must have the time, mandate and competence to make a genuine assessment.
The art is to dose the control according to the consequence: low risk can run on spot checks, high risk demands a genuine review. That is a leadership decision, not a technical setting – and it belongs in the organisation's ground rules for AI.
In practice
A good example is customer communication: the AI writes the draft, but a person presses send. That only works if the employee knows what to check – tone, facts, promises – and is allowed to spend the time on it.
How to explain it to the leadership team
»Human-in-the-loop only works if the human in the loop has the time and the mandate to say no.«
How to design the checkpoints is something I work on in concrete terms on the course Adoption – the intelligent organisation.