Automate the Sure Cases, Review the Rest
Let AI act on its own only when its confidence clears a bar you set by what a mistake costs. Everything below the bar goes to a person, and the review queue is where people come to trust the system.
Before you automate a decision, settle how sure the AI must be to act on its own, and set that bar by what a mistake costs.
Automate everything, or nothing
Automate everything and people stop trusting it; let the AI only suggest and it saves too little time to pay for itself.
Either the AI does everything, and nobody trusts it, or it only suggests, and nobody reads the suggestions. Adoption stalls either way.
The AI handles what it is sure about and flags what it is not. People handle the exceptions. Everyone knows their part, so everyone trusts the system.
Three zones
A classifier can attach a confidence score to each decision: how sure it is of its own answer. Two thresholds turn that score into three zones.
Illustrative: the proportions are the argument, not a measurement
FlowBase, the triage engine we have in build, uses these defaults: it acts alone above 0.85, sends a decision to a person’s review queue between 0.50 and 0.85, and escalates below 0.50. Each workflow can set its own. The scores in the cards below are examples.
What the review queue records
Every decision a person makes in the yellow and red zones is recorded. The model does not retrain itself; you use the record to improve the system.
The AI decides
With a confidence score attached
A person reviews
Approves, corrects or rejects it
The decision is recorded
The verdict, and any correction
You tune the system
Move the thresholds and fix the categories it gets wrong
The record shows which categories keep landing in review and where the AI is confidently wrong. Act on it and the review queue gets shorter.
Where to set the bar
The threshold depends on what a wrong decision costs.
Routing email, answering FAQs, booking appointments. A bar of 0.75, for example: a wrong call is a minor, easily fixed inconvenience, so favour speed.
Financial approvals, legal documents, anything medical. A bar of 0.95 or higher, or 1.00, which in FlowBase means a person sees every one. A wrong call is serious, so favour accuracy and accept more review.
The review queue is where trust is built
Each time a reviewer checks a decision and finds it right, their trust in the system grows. The queue is also your measure: if it gets shorter over time, the tuning is working, and if it does not, look at what reviewers keep correcting.
Which of your decisions could run on their own, and which should a person always see?
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