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OpenAI AI Agent Design Guidance

Designing Safer AI Agents: The Power of Human Intervention

2 min readApr 28, 2025

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Drawing from OpenAI’s AI Agent Design Guide, one key takeaway stands out: plan for human intervention. It’s not just a safety net — it’s a critical strategy to enhance your AI agent’s real-world performance while maintaining a seamless user experience.

Early in deployment, human intervention helps identify failures, uncover edge cases, and build a robust evaluation cycle.

By implementing mechanisms for graceful handoffs, agents can escalate tasks they can’t handle — whether it’s a customer service query passed to a human agent or a coding task returned to the user.

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When to Trigger Human Intervention

Exceeding Failure Thresholds: Set clear limits on retries or actions. If an AI Agent struggles (for example, failing to grasp customer intent after multiple tries) it’s time to escalate.

High-Risk Actions, sensitive or irreversible tasks — like canceling orders, approving large refunds, or processing payments — should involve human oversight until the agent’s reliability is proven.

By embedding human intervention into your AI Agent’s design, you’re not just mitigating risks — this is paving the way for smarter, safer, and more trustworthy systems.

Chief Evangelist @ Kore.ai | I’m passionate about exploring the intersection of AI and language. From Language Models, AI Agents to Agentic Applications, Development Frameworks & Data-Centric Productivity Tools, I share insights and ideas on how these technologies are shaping the future.

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Cobus Greyling
Cobus Greyling

Written by Cobus Greyling

I’m passionate about exploring the intersection of AI & language. www.cobusgreyling.com

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