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Human in the loop

📖 Lesson content

What you'll learn

Estimated time: 20 minutes

By the end of this lesson you'll be able to:

  • Integrate AI into your organization in ways that strengthen human capacity and support your business goals
  • Address concerns about AI dependency and preserving human connection
  • Create an organizational AI policy that reflects your values and ensures sustainable AI use

Keeping the human in the loop

(5 minutes)

This video addresses two of the most common concerns professionals have about organizational AI adoption: dependency and preserving human connection.

Key takeaways

  • Being "the human in the loop" means more than oversight — you decide what problems AI should solve.
  • Avoid dependency through understanding, not avoidance: can you explain what the AI is doing? If yes, that's a good sign.
  • AI should free you for more human work, not less — the handwritten card, the personalized outreach, the relationship building.
  • Set cultural norms around productivity early: discuss what happens with the time AI saves.
  • An AI policy helps scale your understanding — documenting decisions about platforms, task delegation, oversight, transparency, and values.

Exercise

Exercise: Draft your AI use policy

You've now used AI across research, data, and end-to-end workflows. This exercise uses everything you've built in the course — starting with your context document — to write a short, honest AI policy for your business.

Part I: Reflect (in your own notes, 5–7 minutes)

Pull up your context document from Lesson 1. Read it with fresh eyes — you've done several exercises since you wrote it. Then answer these three questions:

  1. What tasks am I now confident handing to AI? Be specific — not "writing" but "drafting first-pass responses to common customer inquiries."
  2. What will I always keep human? Name the work where your judgment, relationships, or accountability are non-negotiable.
  3. What do my customers and team need to know about how I use AI? Consider what you'd say if someone asked directly.

Part II: Build it with AI

This policy will serve as a shared reference for you and anyone on your team — a clear agreement about how AI gets used in your business, so everyone is working from the same understanding rather than making it up as they go.

Share your context document and your answers from Part I with AI and ask it to help you draft a one-page AI use policy with three sections:

  • What we use AI for — specific approved tasks and tools
  • What stays human — the work AI doesn't touch and why
  • How we stay accountable — oversight, transparency, and what happens when something goes wrong

Then do what you'd do with any AI output: read it, fix what doesn't sound like your business, add what's missing, cut what's not true.

Part III: Stress-test it

Read your finished policy and ask yourself: Is there anything I softened that I should say more directly? If a customer asked "do you use AI in your business?" — does this policy give you a clear, honest answer to share?

Lesson reflection

  • How has your thinking about AI integration changed from the beginning of this course?
  • What's one thing you'll do differently in your work with AI based on what you've learned?

What's next

In the next lesson, we’ll close out the course, share resources for what comes next, and you’ll be able to collect your certificate.

Feedback

As you progress through the course, we'd love to hear from you about how you are using concepts from the course in your work, plus any feedback you may have. Share your feedback here.

🎬 Video transcript

Source video: UE8QZlaPr2E

No transcript available — see lesson body for narrative content.

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