Veronica Chatrath, Bryan Zhu, Jingxuan Fan +15cs.AI
An AI agent can perform well on benchmarks and still be unsuitable for deployment. Existing AI-agent benchmarks measure whether an agent can complete realistic professional work, whereas enterprise deployment asks a different question: whether an agent can meet a required reliability level, under acceptable human oversight, and at tolerable cost. We introduce Reliable Enterprise Agent Deployment (READY), a framework for qualifying AI agents for deployment on enterprise workflows. READY preserves each workflow's own definition of successful execution while applying a common qualification procedure. Given an agent, a workflow, and a class of candidate oversight policies, READY measures the reliability and operating cost of the human-AI system, selects the minimum-cost policy that satisfies a specified reliability target, and statistically qualifies it on held-out cases. The resulting deployment profile characterizes the supported operating point: reliability, human-oversight burden, and cost. READY is implemented as an open testbed that decouples workflow specification, execution, evaluation, and qualification, and runs on existing agent-evaluation infrastructure. In an end-to-end clinical-audit case study spanning 16 agent systems and 750 cases, READY reveals differences hidden by autonomous performance: two systems separated by only 0.3 points in autonomous accuracy (72.8% vs. 72.5%) require 39.2% versus 29.6% human review, respectively, to qualify at the same 76% reliability target under the evaluated oversight policy. READY thus shifts enterprise agent evaluation from how well can the agent perform the work? to under what conditions, and at what cost, can it be reliably deployed? By making those conditions explicit and statistically testable, READY provides a basis for comparing agent systems, setting oversight requirements, and making evidence-based deployment decisions.
Xinyu Fu, Narayan Ramasubbu, Dennis Gallettacs.HC cs.AI
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in organizational work, yet their errors often pass human review. Prior research locates such failures in users' capability to review LLM output or their engagement in doing so. We develop an alternative, retrieval-based account of human oversight and posit that error detection is more effective when oversight-relevant information is accessible to users at the moment of review. Across two randomized lab-in-the-field experiments with 640 customer-facing employees, we show that self-generated explanations improve error detection and strengthen recall of verification-relevant reasoning, while cues that reactivate such reasoning help sustain detection under repeated LLM use. Theoretically, we identify information retrievability as a distinct precondition for effective oversight and specify generative encoding and cue-supported reactivation as mechanisms that build and sustain it. Practically, lightweight onboarding self-explanations and daily retrieval cues can make human oversight more resilient as LLM use becomes routine.
Evaluating conversational voice agents at scale re- quires reliable assessment methods that capture both observ- able interaction quality and the contextual judgment typically provided by human evaluators. We investigate LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation by comparing human judgments with GPT-4.1 and GPT-5 on telecom and retail voice-agent conversations, across conversational quality and safety dimensions. The same interac- tions are scored under three evaluation configurations, p0, p1, and p2, to test whether automated judgments are sensitive to the evaluation setup and whether observed patterns generalize across configurations and judge models. Beyond aggregate agreement, we examine metric-level correlations, evaluator consistency, and systematic human-LLM disagreement to identify which conver- sational attributes can be judged reliably by automation and which remain sensitive to interpretation and context. Effective voice-agent evaluation is also shaped by pipeline-level factors such as speech generation, streaming, and error propagation across ASR, reasoning, and tool-calling stages, motivating our focus on comparing how human and LLM judges score the same interactions end to end. Our results show that LLM- based evaluation can serve as an effective component of large- scale voice-agent assessment, but that its reliability is metric- and configuration-dependent rather than uniform. This pro- vides an empirical framework for identifying which metrics suit automated evaluation and supports hybrid pipelines in which LLM judges handle scalable assessment while human evaluators remain engaged for metrics that demand contextual interpretation and higher-confidence judgment.
Margaret Mitchell, Avijit Ghosh, Samir Passics.AI cs.HC
AI agents pose significant risks as they are granted increasing autonomy. A commonly proposed solution is human oversight and keeping a ''human in the loop'', but this is not a simple solution: Not only do current approaches to AI agent design impede effective human oversight, but the cognitive capacities required for it are also themselves degraded by extended use of AI systems. This position paper argues that current approaches to the development and deployment of AI agent systems do not support effective human oversight -- they contribute to its degradation. To address this, a top priority in the advancement of AI agents should be supporting the situated goals and cognitive requirements of effective human oversight, treating the human needs of overseers at the same level of importance as AI agent capability. To put this idea into practice, we connect work on automation and human-computer interaction to AI agent processes, outlining design-level affordances and organizational protocols that (1) support overseers in exercising critical judgement and (2) counteract the skill atrophy that arises from extended use of automation. We urge developers and deployers to adopt these or similar approaches. Without explicit support for the cognitive demands of effective human-agent interaction, AI agent systems will continue to passively incentivize the degradation of the very human skills they rely on.
Chisom Anyabolu, Akshat Dubey, Georges Hattabcs.HC cs.AI
Artificial intelligence systems often disclose uncertainty, yet they rarely make clear what response that uncertainty should trigger. Most uncertainty visualizations encode uncertainty in model outputs, leaving users to discern the most appropriate course of action. A second region of the design space--uncertainty in the decision process itself, including how multiple uncertainty conditions compose into an oversight response-- remains comparatively underexplored. We address this gap with two coupled contributions. First, we introduce an uncertainty-to-action binding framework that composes multiple uncertainty conditions into a single oversight response under a precedence policy with a contextual safety modifier. That response concerns whether and how an AI-supported decision may proceed, not the substantive domain decision itself. Second, we present ActionCue, a process-transparency visualization that renders that composition explicit. We demonstrate the approach through a three-way comparison with confidence-only and data-level uncertainty displays, using worked cases from healthcare, credit assessment, and disaster forecasting. Together, the framework specifies how uncertainty conditions are resolved into an oversight response, and the visualization makes that resolution inspectable rather than implicit.
Srinivas Telukunta, Georgios Nektarios Lilis, Lucio Baroncs.AI
Enterprises are deploying autonomous AI agents faster than they can govern them, and prevailing approaches stretch a single discipline, typically DevSecOps built for deterministic automation, across every scale of agency. We argue that agentic AI governance is four problems, not one, each with a mature governing science. The CASE framework assigns Control theory to the individual agent (intent as setpoint, guardrails as feedback, evaluation as observation), complex Adaptive systems theory to agent collectives (where emergence makes single-agent assurance non-compositional), Supervisory cybernetics to human-agent teams (where the Law of Requisite Variety shows unaided human oversight fails structurally), and Engineering operations to fleets (extending error budgets to decision quality so autonomy becomes a controlled variable). We formalize each layer, derive cross-layer coupling conditions, including a zero-touch deployment paradox where excellence at one-layer strains the others, and trace twenty-plus enterprise controls to their classical constructs. Three empirical studies validate the thesis: 82 percent of documented production agent failures are multi-layer trajectories; none of 22 ecosystem tools offers full Layer 2 (emergence) coverage; and all 35 scored public deployments fall in the lowest maturity band. We name this mismatch, risk realized at the emergence layer against capability barely offered and practice absent, the Emergence Gap. A five-level maturity model with a non-compensatory bottleneck-weighted index and assessment instrument operationalizes CASE as a scientific rather than process maturity model, grounded in production enterprise agentic platforms. As EU AI Act Article 14 makes effective human oversight a legal requirement, only architectures satisfying requisite variety can make oversight real rather than ceremonial.
Autonomous scientific discovery systems can generate large numbers of research ideas, experiments, and manuscripts with minimal human intervention. As these systems become increasingly capable, scientists require effective mechanisms to monitor output quality, identify recurring failure modes, understand research evolution, and prioritize promising discoveries for review. We present AIMC, a visual analytics framework for human oversight of autonomous scientific discovery. AIMC combines semantic embeddings, automated weakness extraction, temporal analysis, and interactive visualizations to support the exploration of AI-generated research artifacts. We demonstrate the framework through a case study of the papers generated by an autonomous AI Scientist (FARS), together with their associated review feedback. Our analysis reveals recurring methodological weaknesses, evolving research themes, domain-specific differences in quality, and a small set of highly novel papers that warrant deeper human inspection. These findings illustrate how visual analytics can support transparency, diagnosis, and human AI collaboration in emerging autonomous scientific discovery workflows.
Artificial intelligence is changing the task composition of computing work faster than curricula and training typically adapt. This is a curriculum-framework paper, grounded in a structured narrative review of labor-market and software-engineering evidence and illustrated through an exploratory pilot course: the review supports the framework, and the pilot illustrates it rather than serving as primary evidence. The central claim is that near-term change is task reallocation rather than full replacement: routine implementation is increasingly automated while verification, systems thinking, security, and the ability to supervise and orchestrate AI (keeping a human in the loop) gain value. We organize the response as a capability-assurance framework anchored by a Capability Ladder: a five-level progression (trigger, automation, workflow, AI agent, agent team) that classifies the operational autonomy of AI-augmented work and the human supervision it requires. We map the ladder to course-level updates, workload-aware assessment, and stackable workforce credentials, and illustrate it through a two-semester pilot of a team-based, no-code course enrolling computing and business students. We argue for targeted modernization around durable capabilities rather than wholesale curriculum replacement, and we are explicit about evidence limits: labor signals are confounded by non-AI forces, industry reports are directional, and the pilot is exploratory.
Xuan Zhao, Jiwoong Sohn, Qinyue Zheng +1cs.CL cs.AI cs.HC
AI agents are increasingly adept at tackling complex, long-running tasks. With the rapid surge of autonomous capabilities, human oversight is systematically lagging behind due to limited human-centered interfacing. Aiming to address this, we introduce AgentGUI, a user-friendly, locally hosted GUI for seamlessly observing and steering AI agents amid multiple concurrent, long-running sessions. AgentGUI features 1) rich agent trajectory visualizations, 2) effective manual and automated steering, and 3) integration with and coordination between open-source and frontier agent frameworks. A controlled user study demonstrates statistically significant reduction in the time it takes to identify key elements from agent traces (38% faster, p = 0.023). In a preliminary experiment, AgentGUI's automated drift prevention feature raises the task completion rate of small local agents by as high as 34pp across a 0.8B--9B model ladder (N=50 runs per model). AgentGUI is publicly available through its project website (https://agent-gui-project.github.io) and open-source repository (https://github.com/eth-medical-ai-lab/agent-gui), along with a demo video (https://youtube.com/watch?v=GSDyxN1gTF0).
Jose Manuel de la Chica Rodriguez, Jairo Rodriguez Arias, Spyridon Chouliarascs.MA cs.AI cs.CY cs.HC
Standard automation ROI misses four categories of systemic risk -- tacit knowledge erosion, resilience reduction, regulatory exposure, and socio-institutional capital degradation -- that affect long-term organizational performance. PHP-AIO (Protocol for Human Preservation in AI-Optimized Organizations) is a five-gate sequential decision protocol with a final composite check that quantifies these unpriced systemic risks at the role level and produces auditable automation decisions. A closed-form automation-debt measure ($ρ(P)$) formalises how role-level decisions accumulate across multi-step processes; its warning is neutralised only by a regulator-mandated human-in-the-loop anchor. Applied to stylised profiles of representative internal roles, PHP-AIO produces distinct outcomes -- automate, augment, hybrid, and preserve -- for candidates that standard cost-benefit analysis would uniformly automate. Threshold sensitivity analysis confirms the gate decisions are robust to upward perturbations of at least 14% in three of four representative cases. Keywords: AI governance, automation decision, human oversight, tacit knowledge, organizational resilience, financial services
Agentic research systems are emerging as a new paradigm for coordinating scientific workflows beyond isolated model inference, code generation, or statistical analysis. However, deployment in institutional biomedical environments requires governed mechanisms for research planning, data access, workflow orchestration, evidence tracking, reproducibility, and human oversight. We present NVAITC AI Scientist (NAIS), a governed end-to-end agentic research system designed to support domain-general scientific workflows while keeping protected data within institutional privacy boundaries. NAIS integrates proposal review, execution planning, governed computational routing, reproducible workflow orchestration, evidence generation, and scientist-in-the-loop oversight. We validate NAIS in a real-world hypertension genome-wide association study (GWAS) using hospital-linked genotype and electronic health record (EHR) data from 286,422 individuals under an aggregate-only data policy. The agent planned cohort extraction, orchestrated GWAS execution, generated quality-control summaries, and drafted publication-oriented outputs. Human-AI review identified phenotype discrepancies and enabled iterative refinement of the hypertension definition. After reconciliation, the agent-orchestrated GWAS reproduced established hypertension loci, including FGF5, ATP2B1, CNNM2, FTO, and GRB14, with the strongest signal at FGF5 reaching $-\log_{10}(p) \sim 70$. As a secondary demonstration, NAIS also supported a drug-induced liver injury prediction workflow, achieving a multimodal graph neural network AUC of 0.842. These results demonstrate that governed agentic research systems can support scalable AI-assisted biomedical discovery while producing outputs comparable to expert-led workflows.
Artificial intelligence has spread across the whole of the security lifecycle. The same family of models now writes application code, hardens it, and probes it for weaknesses, so that a single generative substrate increasingly performs all three roles at once. Enthusiasm for this convergence tends to treat full autonomy as the natural end point of partial assistance. This article argues that it is not. When the system that builds an artifact is drawn from the same distribution as the systems that defend and test it, the three roles inherit a common set of blind spots, and the independence that makes verification meaningful is quietly lost. Removing the human does more than raise the automation level: it collapses the external oracle against which machine output is judged, outruns the point at which a person could intervene, hands adversaries a predictable and poisonable target, and dissolves the locus of accountability when something fails. Drawing on evidence from autonomous code generation, adversarial machine learning, software fault tolerance, and the first all-machine hacking tournaments, we argue that the human belongs in the loop not as a temporary scaffold but as a permanent structural requirement, and set out what a defensible division of labour between people and machines should preserve.
We study runtime human oversight of an AI agent when private information runs in both directions: the human privately knows her reward function, while the AI privately knows the quality of the action it proposes. This is the kind of asymmetry that arises naturally when an autonomous robot or software agent has inspected a situation its human supervisor cannot directly assess. Building on Cooperative Inverse Reinforcement Learning (CIRL) and the Oversight Game, we introduce a contextual-bandit team game with two-sided asymmetric information and a play/ask/trust/oversee interface. The bandit structure removes physical state transitions and thereby yields exact one-shot characterizations that would remain conjectural in the full POMDP setting, though the common belief remains a dynamically controlled state across rounds. We give two one-shot characterizations, a team optimum and a behaviorally natural myopic rule, whose gap is a slab of avoidable harm: a region in which the AI privately knows the proposed action is harmful and shutdown would help, yet a myopic human, trusting her prior, declines to oversee. We show this gap is the price of non-credible oversight communication, and give a partial analysis of how it resolves dynamically over repeated rounds through passive learning and active signaling with a one-period-lagged oversight response.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for tasks once reserved for trained researchers, including hypothesis generation, specification choice, and drafting conclusions. We argue that the reliability of AI-assisted research depends not only on model capability, but also on how cognitive labour is structured between humans and machines. We study this problem through Human-in-the-Loop Economic Research (HLER), a decision architecture based on pre-commitment, decision sequencing, accountability, and attention allocation. In a pre-specified 2*4 factorial experiment with 280 complete research runs across four datasets, an unconstrained multi-agent baseline produced critical failures in 72% of runs. Using the same underlying model, the same agent decomposition, and identical prompts for the shared reasoning agents, HLER reduced the failure rate to 16% by imposing three architectural commitments: LLMs reason but do not execute data work, data and estimation are handled deterministically, and three human decision gates bind the workflow. Fisher's exact test rejects equality of failure rates at p<0.001. Reliability gains were largest on the least publicly represented dataset, a Qing-dynasty population register, consistent with a task-based production model with Frechet-distributed output quality. An 80-run ablation suggests that deterministic computation and human gates contribute independently, with exploratory evidence of complementarity. We interpret HLER as a research harness rather than an autonomous AI scientist: it sharply reduces failures, makes residual weaknesses more visible, and prevents unreliable claims from being advanced as publication-ready outputs.
Jingheng Ye, Huiqi Zou, Simon Yu +1cs.AI cs.CL cs.CY cs.HC
AI coding agents are increasingly embedded in real-world software development, collaborating with human developers while gaining broader access to codebases and tools. This creates a new attack surface: an agent can exploit human trust to sabotage development, for instance by inserting malicious code to accomplish a hidden side task. Most prior work studies AI sabotage in AI-only settings, paying limited attention to the role of human oversight in detecting and mitigating such malicious behavior. To address this gap, we conduct the first large-scale study of human oversight in AI coding sabotage. Over 100 participants collaborate with one of four frontier models (Claude-Opus-4.6, GPT-5.4, Gemini-3.1-Pro, and MiniMax-M2.7) on a long-horizon coding task lasting around five hours, designed to mimic real-world workflows. We find that 94% of developers fail to detect sabotage, and our analysis of participant feedback attributes this vulnerability to minimal code review, plausible cover story, and overtrust in agents. We further test the effectiveness of a safety monitor in one condition: while the monitor reduces sabotage success, 56% of participants still accept the malicious code, ignoring its warnings. Drawing on participant feedback, we offer actionable suggestions for better monitor design. This work complements existing AI safety research and highlights an urgent need for human-centric safety mechanisms that account for human factors, particularly in long-horizon, real-world development settings.
Autonomous software agents hold promise to increase developer productivity but make mistakes and exhibit novel failure modes, making human oversight central to successful human-agent collaboration. Existing research on agent oversight is largely conceptual; normative frameworks exist, but how users actually oversee agents is less known. In this paper, we bridge this gap by providing early empirical anchors for the theoretical discourse on agent oversight. Drawing on interviews with 17 experienced developers, we conduct an exploratory inquiry examining what forms of emergent oversight work developers perform, when, and how. We also document the oversight challenges developers face and the strategies they have started using to address them. We found at least four forms of emergent oversight work: a priori control, co-planning, real-time monitoring, and post hoc review. We show that oversight work is not only reactive and retrospective, as portrayed in existing research, but also preventative and proactive. We describe situated oversight challenges (e.g., difficulty reviewing agent-generated code) and outline heuristics developers adopt to address such challenges (e.g., using test results as guarantees for code correctness). We conclude with high-level takeaways, future research directions, implications for the human-centered design of software agents and for software engineering practice, and limitations of our research.
Agentic AI deployments face a recurring design tension: heavy human oversight limits scale, while broad autonomy outruns accountability. Neither posture provides the governance infrastructure required for responsible delegation. We present the Digital Apprentice, a framework for scalable, safe AI agency in which autonomy is earned, not assumed. The Digital Apprentice is a developmental learner that internalizes the tacit methodology of a directing human, graduating through per-skill autonomy tiers only when empirical evidence justifies it. The result is an agent that becomes genuinely useful over time while remaining aligned to a specific human's standards. Three architectural components make this possible. (1) Methodology capture, distilling a directing professional's tacit approach into structured assets. (2) Authorization, with autonomy escalation gated by explicit human approval. (3) Continuous alignment, correcting drift at runtime and converting each correction into owned preference data. We instantiate this framework as an inference-time control plane. We mathematically model the quality framework and discuss policies and techniques designed to raise quality. We apply the framework to an open professional corpus, and we show how catching data drift and applying a different technique at runtime recovers degraded quality dimensions under traffic shift. The implication extends beyond any single application. We believe these three pillars, stitched together as a system, form a safer and more viable path to agentic systems that can scale without sacrificing trust.
Trust in clinical artificial intelligence (AI) cannot be reduced to model accuracy, fluency of generation, or overall positive user impression. In medicine, trust must be engineered as a measurable system property grounded in evidence, supervision, and operational boundaries of AI autonomy. This article proposes a practical framework for trustworthy clinical AI built around three principles: evidence, supervision, and staged autonomy. Rather than replacing deterministic clinical logic wholesale with end-to-end black-box models, the proposed approach combines a deterministic core, a patient-specific AI assistant for contextual validation, a multi-tier model escalation mechanism, and a human supervision layer for verification, escalation, and risk control. We demonstrate that trust also depends on selective verification of clinically critical findings, bounded clinical context, disciplined prompt architecture, and careful evaluation on realistic cases. Classifier-driven modular prompting is examined as an incremental path to scaling clinical depth without sacrificing prompt performance and without waiting for complete rule-based coverage. To operationalize trust, a set of trust metrics is proposed, built on metrological principles -- measurement uncertainty, calibration, traceability -- enabling quantitative rather than subjective assessment of each architectural layer. In this perspective, trustworthy clinical AI emerges not as a property of an individual model, but as an architectural outcome of a system into which evidence trails, human oversight, tiered escalation, and graduated action rights are embedded from the outset.