Human in the loop
Human in the loop is a design pattern where an agent drafts or proposes work but a human approves before anything ships.
Human in the loop (HITL) keeps a person on the decision path. The agent does the heavy lifting: drafting, researching, assembling, suggesting. The human reviews, edits, and ships. The loop combines agent throughput with human judgment.
HITL is the dominant pattern for high-stakes or externally visible work. Legal, medical, financial, and customer-facing content all benefit from a checkpoint. The cost of a mistake is higher than the time a review adds. Full autonomy only makes sense where the downside is small and the volume is large.
Good HITL design minimizes reviewer load. The draft should arrive ready, with sources cited, assumptions stated, and edits easy. Bad HITL design makes the reviewer start from scratch. At that point the agent is not saving time, it is adding work.
The Amdahl view
Most GTM use cases should stay human-in-the-loop for the foreseeable future. The failure cases of full autonomy in GTM (embarrassing emails, bad pricing, off-brand content) are too expensive. Customer intelligence is what makes HITL fast. The human reviewer gets a draft already grounded in real customer language, so review is editing not rewriting. Autonomy is not the goal. Speed with trust is.
Frequently asked
Related terms
- AI InfrastructureAgent loopAn agent loop is the iterative cycle of observe, plan, act, and observe again that runs until the agent completes its task.
- The IntersectionGTM agentA GTM agent is an AI agent that takes action on behalf of a go-to-market team, including AI SDRs, AI marketers, and AI customer success managers.
- The IntersectionGrounded AI contentGrounded AI content is AI-generated text anchored in proprietary source material with traceable citations back to the original evidence.
- The IntersectionAgentic marketingAgentic marketing is the practice of running marketing motions with AI agents that decide what to do next, not just how to do the current step.
- The IntersectionCustomer intelligenceCustomer intelligence is the structured, queryable layer of meaning a B2B company builds from every conversation, signal, and interaction it has with buyers and customers.
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