The Mixed Team: People and Agents Under the Same Manager

All courses / AI Boss / Module 4 / Chapter 18

Learning objectives

After the lesson the participant can:

Divide a team's work into work that stays with people, supervised agent work and reserved learning work, with reasons.
Explain why agents' throughput must not become the measure of people, and how the two reports are kept apart.
Specify the five properties of a designed handover from agent to person.
Draft a team charter for a mixed team and identify the patterns to avoid.

Key concepts

Reserved learning work: A share of the cases agents could do, kept for people on purpose so that they can check the agents and carry the work when the agents are stopped. The chapter's default is 10 to 20 per cent, reviewed after six months.
Two reports, no shared unit: Agents' figures go into an agent operations report; people's figures are reported at team level. There is no common unit such as claims per hour, and an agent's throughput is never a target or norm for people.
Designed handover: A moment of transfer recorded when a named person accepts the output, a right to return without cost, a standard time to check, visible provenance and a record in the case file.
Complete case: A claim a handler works from first notice to settlement. A share of complete cases keeps task identity, which the chapter notes is lost when a handler sees only the disputed middle of a claim.
Patterns to avoid: The leftover job, the shared dashboard, the silent signature, the agent as colleague and the invisible manager who spends the day verifying agents and has no time for development and care.

Interactive exercises

Do them here and get feedback at once. Choose a card and then where it belongs, or drag it.

Interactive exercise 1 · Sort

Dividing the work in a mixed team

Sort each kind of work under the part of the division in which the team charter TCH-HM-CLM-01 places it.

Interactive exercise 2 · Scenario

The first busy month

Apply the chapter's team design patterns to the situation below.

Teaching plan

10 min	The teacher summarises what the review of human and autonomy teaming found and did not study, and why practice in office and care work is an experiment to be recorded as one.
15 min	Presentation of the three-part division of work and the four parts of separating figures; participants explain why the reserved share is the one most often dropped.
15 min	Group work on handovers: each group redesigns an undesigned handover using the five properties.
25 min	Exercise: groups draft a team charter for a mixed team.
10 min	Debrief: groups check each other's charters against the five patterns to avoid and the answers to Q6 and Q11.

Discussion

On any single day the reserved learning share looks like waste. How would you defend it to someone responsible for the team's throughput?
The chapter says a handover budgeted at zero minutes is an instruction to rubber-stamp. Where in your organisation are approvals budgeted at zero?
To the question what replaces the manager's judgement in care, the chapter's answer for the mixed team is nothing. What follows for the number of agents a team leader can direct?

Written exercise

Exercise · 25 minutes

A team charter for a mixed team

Draft a charter for a team in which people and agents work under one manager: Jana Petersen's claims team, or a team of your own. List every AI system in the team with its usage mode, profile or manifest and the function it touches. Divide the work into the three parts with a reason per line and state the size of the reserved share. Define the two reports, their audiences and units, and the forbidden comparisons. Define each handover with a review allowance in minutes and the rule for returns. Set the care and voice rules: an allocation cap, a reassignment route and a regular review of agent errors without individual scores. Name who must agree or be consulted.

Deliverable: A team charter in the form of TCH-HM-CLM-01 with systems, division of work, figures and forbidden comparisons, handovers, care and voice rules and the agreeing parties.

Your work

Self-test

Choose an answer to see whether it is right, or open the answer below each question.

Under the charter TCH-HM-CLM-01, how is an output that a handler returns to an agent counted?
Show the answer
C. Against the agent's quality only
Returns with a reason are expected and count against the agent's quality, never the handler's throughput, and checking time counts as work. Otherwise the right to return would carry a cost for the person.
What did the review of the empirical literature on human and autonomy teaming find, as the chapter reports it?
Show the answer
A. All 76 qualifying articles were simulations, and the literature said almost nothing about members' learning and need satisfaction
The evidence is simulation-based, mostly military or emergency, and where compared human teams generally did better. The unstudied gap is where M4 Development and M5 Care lie, so practice is an experiment to be recorded.
Which of the following does TCH-HM-CLM-01 list among its forbidden uses of figures?
Show the answer
D. A human-agent ratio as a staffing target without works council agreement
The charter forbids comparing handler output with agent output, using agent throughput as a target or norm for handlers, and using a human-agent ratio as a staffing target without agreement. The other three are permitted practices.