AI shouldn't hit "send" on its own

My opinion: AI shouldn’t hit “send” on its own. Not to a client, not to a live system, not to anything a person would have to clean up later.

I hear the opposite pitch a lot. Let it run. Take the human out. That’s where the time savings are. I think that gets it backwards, for three reasons.

Drafts are cheap. Mistakes aren’t.

A draft costs almost nothing. If it’s wrong, you toss it. A wrong change in a live system costs a lot. A business owner hears about it from an upset customer, and someone spends the afternoon undoing it.

Those two costs aren’t close. So let the tool do all the cheap work, and keep a person at the one point where it gets expensive.

AI sounds sure even when it’s wrong

That’s not a knock. It’s just how these tools work. They’ll hand you a clean, confident answer that’s off in a way you only catch if you read it.

So every tool I build that changes something ends the same way. It does a dry run, shows exactly what it’s about to change, and waits. A person approves that exact change.

People use what they trust

This one surprised me. The approval step doesn’t slow people down. It’s what gets them to use the tool in the first place.

People who are nervous about AI relax when they hear it can’t do anything without them. They try it. They come back to it. A tool people trust and use every day beats a fully automatic one they avoid.

Where I draw the line

Let it run on its own when nothing leaves your own screen: sorting your notes, summarizing a meeting for yourself, writing a first draft. Ask for a yes the moment it touches a client, a customer, money or a shared system.

Somebody will build the fully hands-off version anyway. I’d rather build the one people actually let near their business.