---
title: Why Keep Humans in The Loop?
description: Explore why keeping humans in the loop enhances AI's effectiveness in marketing and sales, ensuring accountability, context, and better results without losing the human touch.
image: https://toughterrainmedia.com/hubfs/Subheading.png
---

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# Why Keep Humans in The Loop?

![AI Slop](https://toughterrainmedia.com/hubfs/Subheading.png)

- September 29, 2026

![Rob Moss](https://toughterrainmedia.com/hubfs/1714500669774.jpeg)

[Rob Moss](https://toughterrainmedia.com/blog/author/rob)

TL;DR: AI is a great tool, but it's not great for everything. Your people matter. Their judgement matters. HITL isn't anti-AI, it's using modern tools to help augment the people you have now. 

I know you're tired. I am too. But this is another AI article. Not created by AI, but about it. 

Seriously, it's all that's being talked about right now and i'm jumping in once again. But, I think there's an understated side of this entire discussion that's being missed in some circles. 

I want to talk about the human side of this, particularly when it comes to marketing and RevOps workflows. Some of these can get dense.

Let's set a couple of definitions:

1. AI, Agent, LLM- You know these.
2. HITL - Human-in-the-loop
3. IFTTT - If this, then that.

Next, let's break this down into a couple of sections:

1. HITL Marketing
2. HITL Sales
3. AI vs. IFTTT
4. Why HITL Is Superior

## HITL Marketing

In some cases, I can see a use case for AI-generated marketing assets helping a scrappy group of marketers punch above their weight class. I also see a world where art (one of the few things that make us human) is removed from marketing/advertising in favor of accelerated AI-generated assets because engagement rates, bro. 

Do I think that's completely and always inherently wrong? No.

 I think as AI technologies improve it's simply going to be the way marketers begin to do things. If I can have an AI create a beautiful person promoting my product in an ad with a simple sentence prompt, would it not make sense for me to do that instead of sourcing talent, sorting contracts, photo release forms, wasting a day on a shoot, waiting days (weeks) for post-production, approvals, etc?

On the flip side, we've all seen the slop, the flyers...OH MY GOODNESS THE FLYERS. You know what i'm talking about. You've seen what i've seen. 

![Credit: @thegrayway247 on instagram](https://toughterrainmedia.com/hs-fs/hubfs/images.jpeg?width=387&height=516&name=images.jpeg)

Obviously the example I provided is satirical. But I would bet you see at least 1 on any social media feed right now. Again, are there examples of decent ones? Sure. 

For a mom and pop business with an owner operator who doesn't have time to learn Canva, does it work? Also yes. That's the beautiful thing about art, right? It's subjective.

But It's also why I believe modern day artists (graphic designers) are irreplaceable. I think sometimes people forget that marketing isn't always about what you can measure via a digital ad platform. Of course the platforms feel it is because you'll spend more money with them. But at the end of the day, there is an invisible, innate factor at play. Call it human psychology or whatever you want to but sometimes good, bad, or indifferent marketing sometimes can't be measured by impressions, clicks, or theory. 

![](https://media2.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExaWJ4b3pyeTgzNGVwOTU2bjZxcm04YzdmbDFsOTNoYWx5Y2luejRvMSZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/C3DJ5zE2l2VUc/giphy.gif)

Which is where HITL comes into play. This may sound very John Connor of me, but, we need to make sure we as humans are harnessing and using the machines. Not the other way around.

### What do I mean by this?

Well, artwork aside, if you're doing any type of digital advertising, how many of you are actively reporting conversions back to the ad platforms? Probably a few! Which is great. 

Now how many of you are actively reporting closed deals or qualified leads back to those same platforms? My guess is probably not a lot, for an infinite number of reasons.

It's often said if the platform is free, it's not the product, you are. I believe that's the case for all of the major tech platforms out there. I also believe that if you spend money with them you should be getting the most bang for you buck when it comes to advertising. Especially since many of these platforms are now including AI in their wizards and ad management. The AIs, the algorithms, whatever nomenclature you use needs to know what is working for you. So we have to tell/train it. 

Let's use the example I first mentioned. Are you tracking coversions? Yes. 

![Untitled (1)](https://toughterrainmedia.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Untitled%20(1).jpg?width=621&height=450&name=Untitled%20(1).jpg)

Great! This is what's happening as long as your tracking. In Google Ads case, you can optimize to get more conversions! Who doesn't want more conversions? 

![Conversion Workflow](https://toughterrainmedia.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Conversion%20Workflow.jpg?width=1135&height=351&name=Conversion%20Workflow.jpg)

The issue is that every conversion is counted as a good one. Let's say you get 30 conversions and only 2 of them are legit. Is that actually useful for you? Probably not, which is where HITL comes in. 

![crm\_ad\_platform\_conversion\_loop](https://toughterrainmedia.com/hs-fs/hubfs/crm_ad_platform_conversion_loop.png?width=640&height=564&name=crm_ad_platform_conversion_loop.png)

We want to report back to these platforms that Lead A is junk and Lead B is good. You may call this good account set up and you would be right. But at least 99% of the advertisers are not doing this. This is less about us doing the legwork for the machine but simply telling the machine what's actually working for us and then backing out our troubleshooting from there if nothing is working. 

If you're unable to take the time or your staff is unable to take the 20 seconds to find the record and mark it as qualified, then we have bigger issues at hand (which I can help you with, btw). AND for a little inside baseball, you can automate the qualification in very specific and tactful ways. 

Which is a fantastic transition into marketing's ugly step-sibling, sales (i'm JK sales ILY). 

## HITL Sales

Before I dig into sales, let's clear the air on something. I will make you two promises right now:

1. I will never AI slop prospect you.
2. I will do my best to ignore your AI slop outreach.

Why?

Well because right now, I have about 20 "pitches" in my LinkedIn DMs that all sound the same:

![](https://toughterrainmedia.com/hs-fs/hubfs/image-png.png?width=896&height=440&name=image-png.png)

By the way, I have 148 of these currently sitting in my email inbox / LinkedIn DMs. 

If anyone in sales can make a coherent argument as to how this is more beneficial to you, your brand, and your results reach out to me. I will make a personalized video retracting this section. 

### The Case For AI

Now that the obvious is out of the way, let's talk about where AI can actually be extremely valuable in the sales discipline (IMHO):

**1. Notetaking**

Historically, I've never been a good notetaker. Perhaps it's because my handwriting is equivalent to wingdings or hieroglyphs. I believe that note-taking bots are single-handidly the best innovation from the AI-boom. For salespeople, this is your second brain. It takes cognitive power to sift through a coversation in real-time for important points and write them down and structure them in a way to refer back to them in an easy-to-follow way. 

If you're not using a note-taking bot I think you're missing a massive opportunity. If anything the notes can help keep your team on track. Especially if it's logged back to the CRM!

**2. Administrative Burden**

We all know them. The salespeople who "don't need" a CRM, the salespeople who miss forms, the sales people who use a CRM but are inconsistent, etc. We all know them because we all have them (sorry for the generalization, salespeople) and sometimes they're the best we have. 

Like note-taking, AI can eliminate some of the administrative tasks you're either bogging your salespeople down with or help them become more effecient. Which leads us to our next section. 

## AI Vs. IFTTT

Here's the thing nobody on LinkedIn wants to say out loud: not everything needs AI.

Somewhere in the last two years, "automation" and "AI" became synonymous. They're not. A lot of what's being sold to you as an "AI agent" is really just IFTTT with a chatbot bolted on top.

So let's split them up.

### **IFTTT is for rules.**

If a deal moves to Closed Won, send that conversion back to Google Ads. If a lead is marked unqualified, pull them out of the nurture sequence. If a form comes in from a certain zip code, route it to that territory's rep. These are decisions you already know the answer to. They're predictable, they're cheap, and when something breaks you can open the workflow and see exactly why. HubSpot workflows, Zapier, whatever you use, this stuff has been around forever and it works.

### **AI is for the messy stuff.**

Reading a 45-minute call transcript and pulling out the budget, the timeline, and the three objections. Looking at a free-text form fill and guessing whether "just need a quote lol" is a real buyer or a tire kicker. Summarizing a deal's history so a new rep can get up to speed in two minutes instead of two hours. Unstructured input, fuzzy judgment calls, stuff that doesn't fit neatly into a dropdown.

### My rule of thumb

**If you can write the rule, write the rule.** Don't task an LLM to make a decision a workflow can make for free, every time, the same way.

Where it gets really good is when you stack them. The notetaker grabs the call. AI pulls out the next steps and suggests a deal stage. A human looks at it for 20 seconds and hits approve. Then IFTTT takes over, updating the record, creating the task, and firing the offline conversion back to the ad platform. Notice who's in the middle of that chain.  

## **Why HITL Is Superior**

AI is confident. Sometimes too confident.

"You're right. My mistake. That mushroom WAS toxic." - ChatGABC (probably)

That's its best and worst feature. It will tell you a lead is a great fit with the exact same energy it uses to tell you a lead is junk, and it'll be wrong in both directions more than you'd like. An algorithm doesn't know that your best customer last year came from conversation in the Trader Joes checkout line that ended with "idk just call me." (true story)

That's what a human in the loop actually brings:

#### **Context**

You know the market, the customer, the weird exception that isn't in any dataset. The machine only knows what you've told it, which loops us right back to the marketing section. If you never tell Google which leads were good, it will happily keep buying you bad ones.

#### **Accountability**

 When a campaign tanks or a deal gets botched, "the AI did it" isn't an answer your boss, your client, or your customer is going to accept. Somebody has to own the outcome. A human checkpoint makes ownership clear.

#### **Trust**

Your buyers can tell. They can tell when a message was written for them and when it was written for 10,000 people at once. That's the whole reason I made you those two promises earlier. The fastest way to burn your brand is to let a machine talk for you without anyone checking what it said.

## **Better machines**

This is the part people miss. *HITL isn't anti-AI.* It's the thing that makes AI actually work. Every time a person marks a lead as qualified, corrects a summary, or rejects a bad suggestion, the system gets a little smarter. Take the human out and the machine just gets more confidently wrong, *faster.*

None of this means slowing down. We're talking 20-second checks, not 20-minute reviews. The goal is to let the machines do the heavy lifting and keep people where judgment matters.

Because the moment we stop telling the machine what "good" looks like, it'll start deciding for us. And I don't think any of us want our marketing, our sales process, or our brand run by something that thinks 30 junk conversions is a great week.

If you want help setting up offline conversion tracking, building the workflows, or figuring out where AI actually fits in your stack (and where it doesn't), reach out.

I promise a real human will answer.

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