A governance plan can do everything right and still fail. According to Unite.AI, an AI workflow that flags an exception at 2:13 a.m. has followed protocol exactly: it halted and called for a human. The flaw is not in the system's logic but in the schedule — the person qualified to make the call does not start work until nine.
This after-hours mismatch means the safety mechanism becomes a bottleneck. The AI has dutifully transferred responsibility to a human who is unavailable, turning a prompt control into an eight-hour delay. The article argues that this gap matters in any operation where exceptions cannot wait for the next business day.
The lesson is that human-in-the-loop oversight is only as strong as the coverage around the loop. Governance plans that assume round-the-clock human availability, or fail to define an escalation path for off-hours alerts, leave a structural blind spot in their own safeguards.