The Autonomy Dial: Five Levels for Shipping AI Features Without Betting the Company
Most teams shipping AI features make the same mistake: they jump straight from "prototype that impressed the VP" to "fully autonomous in production." Then something goes wrong — a bad recommendation, an incorrect auto-response, a financial transaction that should never have been approved — and the entire feature gets pulled. Not dialed back. Pulled.
The problem is not that AI autonomy is dangerous. The problem is that most teams treat autonomy as a binary switch — off or on — when it should be a dial with distinct, instrumented positions between those two extremes.
