The debate on “human in the loop” governance models for AI focuses heavily on who should make decisions, yet it often treats decision-making as something that happens at the end of the process. Structuring the problem occurs much earlier and is a key factor in making decisions.

In fact, the way we structure a problem has a disproportionate impact on how well we understand it and our likelihood of solving it. In this article, I’ll unpack why problem structuring is so important and why I believe that it is something users should own in high-risk, AI-assisted decisioning models. An insurance claim I once managed illustrates the point.