Even Google Needs Humans
Ruth Porat's human-in-the-loop mandate gives product teams a concrete framework for building agentic systems that users will trust and regulators will accept.
Google CFO Ruth Porat told Fortune that agentic AI systems "must have a human in the loop" for oversight and intervention. This isn't corporate speak about responsible AI—it's a concrete design principle that product teams can use right now.
I think Porat just outlined the trust architecture that every agentic system needs. When AI agents start making decisions with real consequences, the human oversight layer becomes your liability firewall and your user confidence signal rolled into one. The question isn't whether to include humans, but how to design that interaction so it works.
For product teams building agentic workflows, this creates immediate design requirements. You need to architect human checkpoints before autonomous actions, which means designing review interfaces, setting intervention thresholds, and building audit trails that show human decision points. Engineering teams need to think about handoff protocols and escalation triggers alongside algorithmic performance.
For legal teams, this creates a cleaner liability story. When something goes wrong with an AI agent, you can point to the human who reviewed, approved, or intervened in the decision chain. That human oversight becomes evidence of reasonable care and due diligence in your compliance documentation.
The timing matters too. As agentic AI moves from demos to production systems that handle customer service, financial transactions, and business operations, companies that build trust frameworks early will capture market share from those scrambling to retrofit safeguards later.
