Glossary
Human on the loop
A person who supervises an agent run from its record and can intervene. The step does not wait for approval before it counts.
Human on the loop means a person supervises a run and can step in. The action proceeds under the rules already set. The person watches telemetry, traces, or another record, and intervenes when that record shows a problem.
Deloitte’s November 18, 2025 essay, read November 8, 2026, names a spectrum: humans in the loop, on the loop, and out of the loop. It says the first two rely on dashboards for outcome tracing and orchestration so a person can intervene, and it predicts that in 2026 the most advanced organizations will begin shifting some supervision toward human-on-the-loop. That is Deloitte’s forecast.
On this site the phrase stays distinct from human in the loop, which means a person approves, edits, or stops a step before that step counts. How many steps are allowed before someone is asked is autonomy. The long explainer is How do AI agents work?.