AI agents need a route to human judgment
Reviewed by Helen Jones
In a new analysis, Ethan Mollick argues that longer-running AI agents need defined moments to seek human approval, expertise, and judgment. His proposed design question is not how to remove people from a workflow, but when an agent should escalate to them.
Many agent experiments begin with a list of tasks to automate and a final quality check. That leaves a gap in the middle: an agent may encounter a payment, an external contact, sensitive information, or an ambiguous decision long before a final reviewer sees the result. An escalation point is more than an emergency stop. It can preserve the human decisions that need context, authority, or genuinely different ideas, while letting the system handle low-risk repetitive work. The source is a practitioner analysis, so use it as a design lens rather than proof that one control pattern fits every workflow.
Analysis
For one agent workflow, write down the first three moments when it must pause for a named human decision instead of continuing on its own.
Source note
Pulse published by Collab365 Spaces, reviewed by Helen Jones on . Cite as "Agents need a route to ask for judgment", Collab365 Spaces.