Everyone agrees it’s important to keep a “human in the loop” as AI becomes part of delivering an outstanding customer experience, but it took Ken Braatz to define exactly how that should work.
The CTO of business process outsourcing (BPO) specialist SupportNinja is the lead author of HITL Operations Framework, a free resource for effectively pairing people with the technology. It includes five functional domains, accountable roles, operating cadences and a maturity model organizations can use to assess themselves.
Braatz said SupportNinja began developing the framework out of its own need to handle human-in-the-loop processes and is now passing it on to the market at large. While other areas of technology have guidelines such as ITIL and NIST to standardize best practices, AI and human oversight represented a void that needed to be filled.
“There was a common thread across all of these failures, all of the missed expectations,” Braatz told 360 Magazine. “It just came down to a lack of operational discipline.”
Part of establishing that discipline involves clarifying roles and responsibilities around AI, which sometimes begins as a project run by IT, marketing or a CX function. SupportNinja’s HITL Framework recommends organizations appoint “knowledge curators” to offer AI platforms the best possible data, quality analysts who examine outputs and “exception handlers” to account for unique scenarios.
“The job descriptions just don’t exist, so we’re literally writing the book on what these roles look like,” he said, adding that the company offers extensive training to help organizations upskill their workforce accordingly.
How HITL provides the ‘care and feeding’ AI needs
Rather than take a “deploy and done” approach to AI, meanwhile, the HITL Framework recommends considering the full operations lifecycle from preparation to activating solutions and then improving them. Braatz said organizations can run into trouble by thinking the work is done once systems go live.
“You can implement a knowledge base. That’s a project,” he said. “But that knowledge base requires care and feeding because the minute it’s done being implemented, it starts to decay.” Humans can help stay on top of those areas, he said.
Deploying AI based on the HITL Framework could help future-proof organizations that will likely add more than one solution or platform as the technology continues to evolve, Braatz said. It’s also a potential input into the kinds of skills CX leaders will need to hire for over the next few years.
SupportNinja also plans to treat the HITL Framework as a living document and update it as new best practices and standards emerge, he added.
Beyond the maturity assessment, Braatz said organizations can measure they’re keeping humans in the loop effectively based on whether AI is delivering the expected value.
“All the vendors are promising 80 per cent deflection rates. Sure, in a very controlled, small POC, they might see that. That doesn’t survive contact with reality,” he said. “It really comes down to the value prop.”
SupportNinja has complemented the HITL Framework with a free downloadable Practitioner Toolkit with templates that help put it into action.