Risk owners · one-page brief
Five questions before your next autonomy decision
Use these before promoting any agentic workflow to less human oversight. Each question has a pass condition. If any question fails, the workflow is not ready to advance.
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1
Can you produce the autonomy record?
For each autonomous action, can the team show when autonomy was granted, what evidence justified it, and which risk it covered?
Pass condition Every promoted workflow has a retained record of the decision, the date, the evidence window, and the accountable owner.
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2
What evidence earns less review?
What signal, over what period, is strong enough to move the workflow toward more autonomy? A good demo is not evidence.
Pass condition The promotion bar is written before the workflow runs at volume, and the team can explain why that bar matches the risk.
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3
Who owns the review discipline?
At cold start, are review decisions consistent, retained, and usable as labels? If not, the maturity curve never gets funded.
Pass condition Review decisions are recorded with enough consistency that they can become training and calibration evidence later.
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4
What sends autonomy backward?
What degradation, incident, or drift condition tightens oversight again, and who gets alerted when that happens?
Pass condition Regression has a written trigger, a safer operating mode, and an owner before the workflow is promoted.
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5
Should this task ever reach full autonomy?
Some workflows should stay partially governed permanently. High-stakes, irreversible, or regulatory actions may warrant durable human oversight regardless of system maturity. Appropriate autonomy is not the same as maximum autonomy.
Pass condition The team has made an explicit decision about the workflow's autonomy ceiling, and that ceiling is documented rather than deferred.