What does human in the loop mean?
Human in the loop is a design pattern where an automated system routes uncertain or high-stakes cases to a person instead of deciding alone. The system reports a confidence score with each output, and cases below a set threshold go to a review queue rather than straight through.
The pattern exists because the last few percent of accuracy is usually the most expensive to automate and the most costly to get wrong. Routing that fraction to a reviewer is cheaper than engineering it away, and it puts a firm ceiling on the damage a model error can do.
The threshold is a business decision, not a technical one. A misread marketing address costs a reprint; a misread dosage or dollar figure costs considerably more. Setting it well requires knowing the cost of a specific error, which is why it belongs to the team that owns the workflow.
Where this shows up in our work
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