How to Answer
“I’d push back on ‘more autonomous’ as a goal, because it isn’t one. Autonomy is a cost you pay to get speed. The real question is which specific approvals are worth removing.
So I’d make it concrete: list every action the agent can take, and score two things per action — how reversible is it, and how accurate are we, measured rather than asserted. Cheap and reversible with high measured accuracy: automate it. Expensive and irreversible: keep the human permanently, and stop treating that as a failure. The middle is where the work is, and that’s where you buy confidence with evaluation before you spend it on autonomy.
The mechanism is graduated and per action type: log-only, then propose-and-approve, then auto-with-undo, then auto. Each promotion has an entry criterion — a measured agreement rate, on a real sample, over a real period.
And the thing worth saying out loud: ‘more autonomous’ usually means ‘the approval queue is a bottleneck’. Sometimes the right answer is a better queue, not less oversight.”