Where AI stops and a human takes over
The most common question I get is not "what can AI do." It's "what happens when it's wrong." That is the right question, and firms deserve a real answer before they hand anything over.
Every system I build has a line in it, drawn on purpose, between what AI is allowed to do on its own and what always routes to a person first. That line is not a limitation of the technology. It is the design.
What AI handles
The repetitive, high-volume, low-judgment work: drafting, summarizing, formatting, moving information between systems, flagging what needs attention. The parts of the job that are draining precisely because they don't require a skilled person's judgment, and shouldn't be consuming it.
What a person is always responsible for
- Anything that goes out under your firm's name to a client
- Any decision that touches tax, accounting, legal, or financial advice, which stays with your licensed professionals, full stop
- Anything where being wrong carries real cost, financial, legal, or reputational
- The first version of any new workflow, until it has proven itself over time
This is what "human-in-the-loop" actually means in practice. Not a disclaimer at the bottom of a page, a specific design decision about which steps a person reviews before anything moves forward.
Why this matters more than raw capability
A system that is impressive in a demo and unsupervised in production is a liability, not a feature. The question that actually matters is not how capable the model is. It's whether someone thought carefully about where it can act freely and where it can't, and built the system to respect that line every time, not just when someone remembers to check.
If you want to see exactly where that line would sit for your firm, an AI Efficiency Audit is where we work that out.
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