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The steps that stay human

In this lesson we read the eight steps of one everyday process, hiring a contractor, twice. The first reading asks which steps an agent could do, and the answer is most of them. The second reading asks which steps stay with a person anyway, and gives the reason per step. The second list is much shorter than the first, and the gap between them is the subject of the lesson. You don’t run anything here. The process is supplied, and the work is reading it and deciding.

The safety course showed where to put the approval before an irreversible step. This lesson is about a wider set of steps: the ones a person keeps even when nothing irreversible happens in them, because of who has to answer for the step, where its information is, or what doing it does for your own judgment.

What an agent could do

Section titled “What an agent could do”

The process below is the one the operations lead at Brindlewick Instruments, the fictional company from the earlier lessons, follows when the team needs an outside specialist for a few months. Read it once as a list of steps, without deciding anything yet.

Hiring a contractor, in eight steps


1. Write the job description from the project notes.
2. Post it on two job boards and collect the applications.
3. Screen the applications against the requirements into a shortlist.
4. Interview the shortlisted candidates.
5. Check the references of the two finalists.
6. Choose the contractor.
7. Agree on the rate and sign the contract.
8. Set up accounts, access and a first-week plan.

Now ask, step by step, whether an agent with a browser, your email and your calendar could do it. Step 1 is a drafting task from notes it can read. Step 2 is form filling and collecting mail. Step 3 is reading applications against a written list of requirements and sorting them. Step 4 is scheduling and, with a meeting tool, even taking notes. Step 5 is sending the reference emails and summarizing the answers. Step 6 is a comparison of the notes and the summaries. Step 7 is filling in a contract template. Step 8 is creating accounts and writing a plan from the job description. The agent could take part in every step and could carry out seven of the eight on its own. The only step where a person has to be present is the interview, and even there the agent could book the room and write the notes.

A person who stops at this point concludes that the whole process can be handed over with an approval before the contract is signed. That conclusion mistakes “could do” for “should do”, and the next section is about the difference.

Why a person keeps a step anyway

Section titled “Why a person keeps a step anyway”

Set the process aside for a moment, because the reasons are easier to see in smaller examples. A step stays with a person because someone has to answer for it, because its information is in no system the agent can reach, or because doing it keeps the person able to judge the agent’s work.

Someone has to answer for it. A manager’s performance review has a rating in it, and an agent can draft a fair rating from the year’s notes. The rating stays with the manager. The person who has to explain it to the employee later is the one who must have decided it. When a colleague asks “why a three?”, the answer “the tool said so” ends the manager’s part in the process. The process was there to have a manager in it. An agent can prepare a step it can’t be accountable for, and accountability is the reason the step stays with the person who holds it [1].

The information is in no system the agent can reach. Picking a time for a difficult meeting looks like a calendar task. The agent reads every calendar and finds the free slot on Thursday afternoon. You know that the colleague you are meeting has had a hard week and that Thursday afternoon is the last thing they need, and you know it because they told you in the corridor. Nothing the agent can read holds that fact. A step whose input is in your memory, in a conversation, or in the look on someone’s face stays with you because the agent would do it without the input that matters.

Doing it is what keeps you able to judge the agent’s work. Reading the first few applications yourself is slower than reading a shortlist. It is also how you learn what this year’s applications look like and whether the shortlist the agent made left the right people out. A person who has read none of the applications for two years can approve any shortlist and reject none. They no longer know what a good one contains. A person keeps some steps as the price of being qualified to check the rest, in the same way a pilot flies some landings by hand to stay able to take over from the autopilot.

A step can have more than one of these reasons, and none of them is about what the agent can do. The agent can draft the rating, find the slot, and read the applications. The person keeps the step for a reason about the person, and naming that reason is what tells you the step is a choice rather than a limitation that the next version of the tool removes.

Checkpoint · match

Why does each step stay with a person?

Section titled “Why does each step stay with a person?”

Match each step to the reason it stays with a person.

Checkpoint · choice

Does a better agent change the list?

Section titled “Does a better agent change the list?”

A team’s rule is that the agent drafts each performance review and the manager decides the rating. A year later the agent’s drafts are much better. What happens to the rule?

Naming the step is a design choice

Section titled “Naming the step is a design choice”

The list of steps a person keeps is a decision you make, and the time to make it is when the process is set up [2]. The reason is how automation spreads through a process that nobody has mapped this way. Each step the agent can do gets handed over when someone is busy and the tool looks ready. Nobody decides to automate the rating in the review or the choice of contractor. One month the draft has a rating in it, the manager is short of time, and the rating goes out as drafted. The step nobody named as human is automated by default, one busy week at a time, and it happens sooner as tools improve.

A named step behaves differently. “Step 6, choosing the contractor, is done by the hiring manager” is a line in the process description, and when the agent’s summary comes with a recommendation, the line is there to say that the recommendation is input and the choice is still a person’s. A team that writes an AI policy names these steps in it as the approvals a task needs, which is the same list seen from the organization’s side. The rule about which step a person keeps and who oversees it is written down in both places, and for some steps the law writes it down as well. Under the EU AI Act, an AI system that screens or ranks job applicants is a high-risk use (Annex III, point 4(a)). From December 2, 2027, the organization that deploys it must give human oversight to named people who have the competence and the authority to act (Article 26(2)) [3]. So step 3 of the hiring process, the screening, has a person in it in any case. That person reads a sample, owns the shortlist, and is named in the process description.

Naming the human steps has a second effect. A process with named human steps keeps working when the tool is down, because the person who owns a step knows how to do it, has done it recently, and can do the neighboring steps by hand for a day. A process where every step was handed over as soon as it could be has nobody who remembers how step 3 was done. The outage of a tool becomes the outage of the process. The human path is the one you keep on purpose, the same way an office keeps a paper form for the day the system is unavailable.

Checkpoint · scenario

The summary ends with a recommendation

Section titled “The summary ends with a recommendation”

The agent’s summary of the two finalists arrives, and its last line is “Recommendation: candidate B”. The process description says nothing about who chooses. What do you do?

Exercise

Go back to the eight-step process at the top of the lesson. For each step, write down whether it stays with a person or goes to the agent, and for each step that stays, name the reason from the lesson that holds it there. Ten minutes is enough, and the answer is a list of eight lines.

A good answer keeps step 6, the choice, because the hiring manager has to answer for it. The decision in step 7, the rate and the signature, stays for the same reason, and the agent may fill in the contract template. Step 4, the interviews, stays because what the candidate is like in the room is in no system the agent can reach, even if the agent books the rooms and writes the notes. Part of step 3 stays too: the manager reads a sample of the applications and decides the shortlist. That keeps the manager able to judge the agent’s screening, and screening applicants is a high-risk use under the EU AI Act that needs named human oversight. Steps 1, 2, 5 and 8 go to the agent, with the manager reading the results. Where your answer differs, write down the reason you weighed differently, because a different reason is a fine answer and a missing one is the thing to fix. Which step in your list would be automated by default if nobody wrote it down?

Stretch: Take a process from your own work with five or more steps, write the steps out, and mark the ones that stay with a person, with the reason per step. Then check whether your team's written process says so.

Recap

  1. An agent could take part in almost every step of an everyday process, and “could do” is a different question from “should do”.
  2. A step stays with a person when someone has to answer for it [1]. It also stays when the information it needs is in no system the agent can reach. And it stays when doing it keeps the person able to judge the agent’s work.
  3. The reasons are about the person and the process. A better agent changes the draft the person starts from and leaves the list of human steps as it was.
  4. A step nobody named is automated by default, one busy week at a time, so the list is written when the process is set up [2].
  5. Named human steps keep the process running when the tool is down, because someone still knows how to do them.
  6. The boundary that holds is a named step with a named owner, and “be careful” names no step.

You can now

  • Names the steps that stay human and why

References

Section titled “References”
  1. Anthropic. Building effective human-agent teams. Claude Academy. Course. Academy building-effective-human-agent-teams
  2. Anthropic. AI Fluency for builders. Claude Academy. Course. Academy ai-fluency-for-builders
  3. European Parliament and Council of the European Union. Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (Artificial Intelligence Act), consolidated text of 27 July 2026. EUR-Lex. Reference. AI Act