Warm Body Problem
Oversight on paper, absent in practice.
Founder, Intellectus Advisors
I spent years in product leadership at AI-native companies. Pilots worked. Production broke.
The models were fine. Nobody was measuring whether a human was still in the loop. I studied 40+ deployments to see what working oversight looks like, then built the HITL Maturity Model and HHI to measure it.
Creator of the HITL Maturity Model™ and HHI™
40+ deployments studied · Forbes Tech Council Published Articles · Women in Product
- Forbes Tech Council Published Articles
- 40+ deployments studied
- Women in Product
- MIT Hacking Medicine
- Sidebar
Most organizations think they have human oversight. They don't.
When the AI is wrong, someone has to catch it. In most systems I audit, that someone does not exist, is drowning, or has no way to prove they caught anything.
Burnout by Design
Reviewers flooded past capacity.
No Measurement Standard
Nothing to benchmark against.
The EU AI Act and NIST AI RMF both mandate meaningful human oversight but never define what "meaningful" looks like in practice.
The Framework
The HITL Maturity Model™: five levels
A shared language for where an AI system actually sits, not where the deck says it does.
- L0 · Automation-First
The system runs. Oversight is a story people tell themselves.
- L1 · Reactive HITL
Humans intervene after something goes wrong, not before.
- L2 · Designed HITL
Review is scoped and routed, but capacity is the ceiling.
- L3 · Collaborative Intelligence
The model and the reviewer make each other better in the loop.
- L4 · Adaptive Governance
Oversight quality is measured, monitored, and improves over time.
Proof
Where the work shows up
Advisory roles
“We took your recommendations seriously. Most of the jump is in Governance, the dimension you flagged, with real gains in human capacity and intervention quality too.”
“The maturity model gave me a practical framework to evaluate where my product stood and identify the highest-impact opportunities to improve. It helped me move beyond intuition, make more strategic product decisions, and build with greater confidence.”
“Su builds clarity where others see chaos. In 12 months, she helped a team reach $2M revenue with no sales team, cutting dev time by 40% and driving focused execution.”
Speaking
Talks on AI oversight, for rooms that make decisions.
I speak on human oversight design at conferences, internal leadership offsites, and board sessions. Formats run from a 20-minute keynote to a 60-minute session with Q&A.
Topics I speak on
- The warm body problem: why AI oversight fails on paper and in practice
- Five levels of HITL maturity, and how to tell which one you are on
- Burnout by design: building oversight around human cognitive limits
- What the EU AI Act and NIST AI RMF actually require of you
- Collaborative Intelligence: designing the next decade of human-AI work
How we work together
How I bring the framework into your organization.
Learn the framework
Bring the model to your team, or start with the free material.
Half-Day Team Workshop
A working session for the team that owns your AI oversight. We run your live systems through the maturity model, name the failure modes you actually have, and leave you with a level and a ranked fix list. Delivered virtually or on site.
- Live walkthrough of all five levels
- Applied scoring against your own workflows
- Ranked priority list your team leaves with
- Virtual or in person
Full-Day Design Intensive
Everything in the half-day session, then a working design block. Your team leaves with drafted routing thresholds, escalation paths, and a reviewer capacity model for one live workflow.
- Everything in the half-day workshop
- Confidence-based routing design for one workflow
- Escalation thresholds and reviewer capacity model
- Written session output and next-step plan
- Virtual or in person
Free Lessons
Short lessons on human oversight design, published free. Start with Field Notes and the newsletter.
- Field Notes on this site
- The Framework Effect newsletter
Bring me in
Direct engagement when the work is bigger than a workshop.
HITL Diagnostic Assessment
Structured evaluation, scorecard, level classification, regulatory gap analysis.
Book a call →HITL Design & Implementation
Confidence routing, escalation thresholds, feedback loops, agentic checkpoint gates.
Book a call →Executive & Board Advisory
Board-ready governance presentations, investor due diligence, regulatory roadmap.
Book a call →The Product
Humyn Pulse: the instrument
I built Humyn Pulse to put this framework into practice. It's the instrument my clients use to measure and monitor oversight quality.
Writing & Talks
Where to read and hear more
Get the newsletter
Case studies and frameworks on AI governance, roughly weekly.