Workflow Wednesday: Fallback Is a Capability

Art by @basilonmypizza: https://lnkd.in/eF8FkWzN - https://basilhefti.ch/

In the last Workflow Wednesday, we talked about interruptibility by design and promised more todos when building agentic systems. Here is the second: fallback and override.

Suppose you introduce transport robots in a warehouse. They move materials and waste. The system works well and replaces humans who did these tasks before. Nobody misses the manual runs. But then a technical problem halts the system.

That hurts. Transport cannot wait, and humans must step in. The problem: nobody is available, and the task is unpopular. If the breakdown is too long, the drop-in cost outgrow the savings.

Now replace transport robot with Agentic System, and you see the problem.

In a recent paper, Giuseppe Romeo & Daniela Conti show that when systems appear reliable, humans reduce verification effort and rely more heavily on them. Plus: Trust in AI systems generalizes. Positive experience with one system increases reliance on the next.

But how to mitigate it?

By foreseeing fallbacks and by designing in manual overrides. We know that domain expertise is one of the strongest protective factors. Because expertise requires repetition, tasks need to be shared between humans and robots. As musicians know well: when we stop practicing, capacity degrades.

By employing people who can perform the task when the system stops. If no one can step in at short notice, fallback exists only on paper.

By implementing rotation models, shadow operation, and … drills. Measuring recovery time is a good idea.

By foreseeing graceful degradation (under stress, uncertainty, or partial failure, the agentic system must reduce scope).

By explicit escalation paths (fully autonomous → human review → human lead), where the system state is visible and understandable. And by adding a hard “I take over” button.

You get the picture. The todo is to add overrides and fallbacks to the agentic system from the start.

If your agent stopped tomorrow: who takes over, and how long would it take?

• Art: https://lnkd.in/eF8FkWzN https://basilhefti.ch/

• G. Romeo, Daniela Conti, July 2025: https://lnkd.in/eQAC89wC