AI is making it easier to be wrong.
by Janet Ply, PhD · The Practical Leadership Newsletter · April `28, 2026
I’m hearing a lot of people talking about “Human in the Loop” with AI.
HITL is the deliberate act of inserting human judgment, validation, and decision-making into AI-driven work, before anything is executed.
Here’s the problem: too many people skim AI output for recommendations, content creation, ideas, resumes, and such and use them without sufficient validation.
That creates a real risk: implementing the wrong thing…confidently.
Chris Prouty said it well:
“We got very good at delivering information.
We never got good at helping people implement it.
Now AI makes information instant, and the implementation gap is wider than ever.”
He calls the missing piece Learned Intelligence.
There is a category of knowledge you cannot get from a course, a framework, or an AI-generated strategy.
You can only get it from:
Let’s look at an example.
I was facilitating a strategic planning session. Each leader brought their top three goals.
A Technology VP said, “My goal is to implement a new software platform to reduce errors.”
He had already used AI extensively:
It all looked solid. But It wasn’t.
“Implementing a system” is not a goal.
It’s an action that should support a goal.
So I asked a few questions and learned that the real issues were:
The same problems would exist, even with the new system.
He couldn’t get a business executive to sponsor the initiative.
So he decided to sponsor it himself.
That’s a red flag.
Technology-led business initiatives rarely succeed without business ownership.
The business executive wasn’t available because she already had two major initiatives underway.
Many of the same people were needed.
He hadn’t considered:
AI didn’t catch any of this.
Because AI doesn’t understand:
It predicts patterns. That’s it.
If you don’t provide the right context, AI will confidently lead you in the wrong direction.
And I see this happen all the time.
AI will give you answers all day long.
That doesn’t mean they’re right. And it definitely doesn’t mean they’re right for you.
Without Human-in-the-Loop thinking: AI accelerates mistakes faster than it accelerates progress.
If your use of AI doesn’t force you to:
You’re not using it well. You’re hiding behind it and hoping nobody will notice.
The prompts I use in my Practical Leadership workshops are built on lived experience and intelligence.
They don’t just generate answers, they challenge them.
If someone tried to list “implement a system” as a goal, the prompt would immediately push back.
It checks for:
And now I’m adding another layer:
Forcing the user to evaluate the output—not just accept it.
Adding questions to the end of your prompts can serve as a useful HITL check:
These alone will improve your results.
I put together a set of Practical AI Prompts for Leaders.
They include:
If you want to learn how to use AI to think better, not just move faster, go to janetply.me and find a time for us to connect.
If you want tactics you can use right now, Practical Leadership: A Guide to Building Trust, Getting Results, and Changing Lives would be a great addition to your library.
Mel Robbins, New York Times bestselling author and host of the Mel Robbins podcast had this praise for the book, “Janet Ply is the real deal. I’ve seen way too many talented people flail in leadership because nobody ever taught them how to do the job well. This book fixes that. Janet has been in the fire, she’s led through chaos, and now she’s giving you the tools she’s used to rescue high-stakes, high-dollar messes. If you lead people - or you want to - Practical Leadership should live on your desk. Get it, use it, lead better.”
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