Human in the loop

In practice, the automation does the laborious part: it reads the email, sorts it, looks up the information, and writes a draft reply. A finished draft then arrives on your phone or in your inbox with Send and Edit buttons. A decision that affects a customer, money, or the company’s reputation stays with a person - it just takes them ten seconds instead of ten minutes.

The reason is not distrust of the technology, but how language models work. They write convincingly even when they are wrong: they get a price wrong, promise a deadline the company will not keep, or answer a complaint in a tone that angers the customer even more. A human in the loop catches such a mistake before it goes out. And each of their edits is also feedback - the automation’s rules and source materials are tuned further based on it.

The loop does not have to be permanent. For steps where a person has long just been confirming without edits, approval can be gradually switched off - for example first for replies to positive reviews, while negative ones continue to go through a person. Each type of task thus earns its autonomy through results in production, not through a promise at deployment.

This is also how the marketing automation at Fotobazoš runs: posts and replies to comments go out for approval, and autonomy is switched on step by step.