Keeping humans in the loop of AI-enhanced workflow automation: 4 best practices

In today's rapidly advancing technology landscape, the role of people in workflow automation and orchestration is more critical than ever. At Tines, we firmly believe that human oversight should be an integral part of important workflows, ensuring that all decisions are grounded in context and experience.

AI in Tines is secure and private by design. This means the platform doesn’t train, log, inspect, or store any data that goes into or comes out of language models. Your input data is used solely for generating your responses. 

For us, keeping a human in the loop goes beyond just providing feedback; it’s about ensuring you’re in complete control of workflows enriched with your private proprietary data, can trust they’re running reliably and accurately, and there is no risk of intellectual property infringement.

The importance of keeping humans in the loop in AI workflows 

While AI can process data at speed and identify patterns beyond human capability, it still lacks the nuanced understanding that comes with human experience. Comprehending the reasons behind an AI system's decisions is essential to preventing it from taking unwanted actions, misinterpreting data, or having excessive autonomy.

By maintaining human oversight, organizations can effectively spot discrepancies and address them before they escalate into larger issues.

Additionally, keeping humans involved in your workflows serves as a safety net. When AI systems encounter unexpected challenges—be it a bug in the code or a failure in the service upon which they rely— those with oversight can intervene to resolve the situation promptly. This helps maintain the integrity of your operations. Therefore, for any business leveraging AI, incorporating human insight and facilitating intervention remains a best practice to safeguard against lapses in system performance and enhance overall reliability.

As AI becomes more fundamental in your environment, it’s important to promote collaboration between technology and humans so complementary strengths can be utilized effectively—with technology handling mundane, tedious tasks and people providing critical thinking and creativity.

Best practices for a human-in-the-loop approach 

1. Establish clear roles and monitoring 

Your team needs to understand when and how to interact with AI systems for effective oversight and environmental awareness. Even when introducing AI incrementally, implementing strong monitoring and alert systems ensures visibility and provides prompt notifications for any unexpected events. A good workflow automation platform makes it easy to set these up.

2. Prioritize training and transparency 

Transparency and explainability in AI decision-making are crucial for building trust and understanding AI outcomes. Implementing feedback loops and consistent training boosts employee understanding of AI tools, promoting critical thinking alongside automation. Regular audits of automated processes help ensure AI functions correctly and adheres to established guidelines.

3. Ensure user control 

Authorized users should easily be able to overrule AI decisions, so it’s important to prioritize user control and secure interactions. Balancing AI efficiency in repetitive tasks with human creativity and critical thinking enhances operational effectiveness and boosts employee engagement.

4. Prioritize end users 

Focus on enhancing employee experiences with AI, not replacing them. Fostering harmonious collaboration between humans and technology will maximize AI’s impact in your organization and enhance your security efforts. Balancing these elements is key to building trust and successful adoption of AI.

How Tines supports keeping humans in the loop 

At Tines, we believe people should always be in the loop, especially for important workflows. Our platform is designed to ensure that you can keep humans involved at every stage of your workflow, regardless of what you are working on or aiming to achieve.

Here are some of the features we’ve designed to support keeping humans in the loop in our automation and orchestration platform:

Build apps 

Much of the repetitive work that consumes security and IT practitioners’ time is often wasted effort that doesn’t need to be done by a person. Build apps with Tines offers a way around this, empowering less technical users to create applications that streamline processes while keeping the human element in focus. 

With this capability, you can collect real-time input via pages and communicate regular updates with stakeholders outside of the Tines’ platform automatically. This ensures that detailed human input is available at various stages of a process, influencing outcomes and injecting essential context as needed. Outputs are communicated back to users, providing insights and confirmation prompts (such as Y/N decisions) that invite engagement at critical junctures. For instance, an AI can interpret and format data, summarize it for easy digestion, and then make built-in recommendations for next steps. However, the final decision always rests with you, thereby preserving accountability and ensuring that the workflow aligns with organizational standards.

AI action 

Secure and private by design, Tines’ AI action does the work for you: it interprets your data, formats and summarises it so it's easy to read, and makes recommendations for next steps. But ultimately it enables you to make the final decision on how to proceed. According to recent research by MIT and Accenture, people are more likely to find and correct unpredictable errors when prompted to review LLM-generated outputs.

Cases 

Tines’ case closure requirements illustrate the importance of human involvement in orchestration. Cases cannot be closed until specific human-verified criteria are met, reinforcing the necessity for rigorous oversight. By embedding requirements that demand human input, such as case descriptions and tags, we underscore the importance of human oversight in workflows.

Change control 

Our commitment to keeping the human in the loop also extends to change control, where users can prototype and make adjustments in a controlled setting before applying changes. This ensures that builders maintain command over their workflows, reflecting their unique needs. 

The importance of active participation and cross-team collaboration 

At Tines, fostering a culture of cybersecurity is a core principle. This approach emphasizes keeping everyone informed and minimizing friction between teams, both within and beyond security. By embedding security into your company culture, it becomes a natural muscle for everyone to flex. 

Tines is used widely by teams outside of security; it enables cross-team collaboration, allowing for seamless information sharing and keeping everyone informed. Our flexible and intuitive platform simplifies understanding of security dynamics, empowering stakeholders across your organization to participate actively.