Human Oversight

Human oversight is the capacity and process for people to supervise AI use and intervene when needed. It depends on what people can observe, understand, and change, as well as when intervention is possible.

An approval click is weak evidence

A support employee must approve every generated refund explanation but cannot see the policy source. The interface records approval without showing that the employee can detect an error. Provide relevant sources, adequate time, training, and authority to reject or escalate.

A reviewer rewarded only for speed may face incentives that undermine careful checking.

Test the human and system together

Use realistic cases and workload to observe whether reviewers catch important failures. Measure correction effort and escalation capacity as well as speed. For automatic actions, intervention after the event may be too late; a different permission boundary or pre-action review may be necessary. Human involvement alone is not a guarantee of safety.

Reference: NIST AI RMF Core.