Decide in advance when a human should step in

Not every situation belongs in front of an automation. Before you build one, decide out loud what kind of message, request, or amount should stop the process and hand it straight to a person instead.

This matters because the moments that need judgment are usually the moments where automation does the most damage if it guesses wrong — an angry customer, a refund request, anything involving legal wording or a large amount of money. If you never draw that line, the automation will happily plow ahead into situations it was never built to handle, and you find out only after something has gone sideways. Drawing the line up front keeps the automation doing what it is good at and keeps a person in charge of what it is not. I write that line down the same day I build the automation, while I still remember exactly where the judgment call sits.

Write the rule down plainly, so it is a policy and not a guess made in the moment.

Try this today: write one sentence naming the exact situation where your automation should stop and flag a human instead.