Welcome back to Marketoonist, the cartoon I’ve been hand-drawing to poke fun at marketing and business nearly every week since 2002. Was this email forwarded to you? Please subscribe here.

Human in the Loop

Share on LinkedIn | Facebook

I drew this week's cartoon inspired by some of the latest growing pains of human-AI collaboration.

As AI gets more autonomous, the traditional "human in the loop" oversight model is showing strain. With pressure to "10X productivity" with fleets of AI agents, how best to keep up with the avalanche and complexity of approvals?

The "human in the loop" risks becoming a tick box exercise, rather than genuine oversight.

Julia Zarb, founder of Blue x Blue, recently illustrated the problem in high stakes healthcare:

“Consider the busy clinician, nurse or manager asked to make a call quickly with partial context ... under pressure, review can become a screen-level action rather than an informed decision.”

That AI approval bottleneck is surfacing challenge in every domain, including customer experience.

Connext released a Global AI Oversight Survey last month that found only 17% of workers believe AI is reliable without human oversight, 64% expect the need for human review to increase, and 20% said AI made customer situations worse.

The Financial Times profiled Amazon's growing pains a few weeks ago with major website service outages caused by AI-generated code. Amazon now plans for additional human oversight.

The "human in the loop" model is hard-pressed to keep up with modern AI systems at the current speed, scale, and complexity. Organizations are experimenting with a shift from "human in the loop" to "human on the loop" (more hands-off) but it will be a bumpy ride.

And when AI makes mistakes, customers tend to blame the company, not the algorithm.

Keynotes

I’d headed to Wisconsin in a few weeks for Experience Inbound (Milwaukee on April 28 and Green Bay on April 29). I hope to see some of you there!

As always, please let me know if you’d like to talk about any events you’re planning (or know of) that you think could be a good fit for some cartoon levity and insight.

For an idea of my approach to keynotes, here’s a full 30-minute keynote from one of my favorite events last year — Opticon 2025 hosted by Optimizely:

Cartoon From The Archives

Here’s a related cartoon I drew in 2024. And here’s where you can read and search all 24 years of these cartoons.

Share on LinkedIn | Facebook

Thank you for all of your support (and cartoon material)!

-Tom

P.S. If you like these marketoons, here are a few ways to help:

1. Bring me into your company to speak

2. License cartoons for presentations or more (if a picture tells a thousand words, a marketoon tells a thousand boring PowerPoint slides)

3. Forward this newsletter to a friend with an invitation to subscribe: marketoonist.com/newsletter.

4. Buy my latest book

5. Collaborate with me on cartoons for marketing, culture change, or thought leadership

6. Just hit reply and say hello

About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.