I run two inbox agents. The one nobody supervises acts on anything above 0.7 confidence. The one with a human review queue behind it refuses to act below 0.8. Every engineer I have explained this to assumes I typed the numbers backwards. I did not. The agent with no safety net earned the lower bar, and how it earned it changed the way I think about autonomy.
The backwards numbers
The first agent reads the inbox for a pharma and biotech events business. When a lead comes in, it classifies the email, upserts the contact by email address, and creates an opportunity in the CRM. Nobody checks its work. No queue, no reviewer. Its floor is 0.7.
The second reads the inbox for a workforce development program. It matches candidates to funding vouchers and moves their status in a tool I built called Voucher HQ. That tool has a real review queue with a real person working it. The agent only auto-applies a decision at 0.8 or higher. Anything below that lands in the queue, and a human decides.
So the supervised agent is timid and the unsupervised one is bold. For a while that bothered me. It looks like a mistake. It is the most deliberate pair of numbers in either system.
