Design human teams for high-severity decisions; agents for volume and variance
Because human review capacity scales slowly—requiring hiring, training, and fixed costs—while agent capacity is elastic and low marginal cost, an economically sound routing framework sizes human teams for highest-severity decisions and assigns agents to both volume and variability.
Supporting evidence
In An Agentic World Where Automation Gets Cheap, Which Work Is Worth Routing to a Human?
Original excerpt
Human review capacity is slow to adjust in either direction. It is added one hire at a time, requires months of training and accumulated institutional knowledge, and is paid for in quiet periods as well as busy ones. Agent capacity is elastic, scaling from a handful of documents to many thousands without a corresponding change in cost structure. A framework that prices review correctly will therefore tend to recommend a human team aimed at the highest-severity decisions, with the agent absorbing the volume and the variance that a fixed team cannot economically carry.
Context
One further property generalizes.