What is an AI handoff?

The moment a decision stops being made by a person who can be asked to explain it, and starts being made by a system that cannot.

The three signs

1. No named owner. Nobody can say who is accountable for the output.
2. No human fallback. The work cannot be done by hand, or nobody remembers how.
3. No verification. The output is checked by the same system that produced it.

How it differs from automation

Automation removes a task. A handoff removes a judgment — the part where someone looks at the whole situation and decides. Automation is announced and usually planned. A handoff is neither.

The test

Can designated humans still perform this function when the network, vendor and AI assistant are unavailable or untrustworthy? If the answer is no, or “we think so”, that is a finding.

See also the quiet handoff, which is how it usually arrives.