The risk is not that AI gets it wrong
People get things wrong too. The risk is that when an automated step goes wrong, nobody owns it. An order was placed, a message was sent, a record was changed, and no one can say who decided. That is what makes a team stop trusting a system.
So we design every agent around one idea: AI drafts, a named person decides. In practice that comes down to four rules.
Every agent has a written scope
Before an agent is built, we write down what it may read, what it may draft and what it may never touch. A reordering agent can read stock and the production plan and draft a purchase order. It cannot send one.
Every draft has a named approver
Not “the purchase team”. A person. The draft waits in their queue with three choices: approve, edit or decline. If they are away, it goes to a named deputy, not into the air.
The agent shows its working
An approval is only real if the person can judge it. So each draft comes with the reason: stock covers three days at the current plan; this supplier’s lead time is five. The approver sees why, not just what.
Everything is logged
The draft, who saw it, what they changed and what they decided are all recorded. Months later you can answer “why did we do that?” in a minute, and so can an auditor.
What this costs, and what it buys
It costs a few seconds per decision. It buys a team that trusts the system without a second explanation, and a business where responsibility is easier to see after AI arrives than it was before.