The KPI Is Time to Closed Loop

8th January 2026

Memo: The KPI Is Time to Closed Loop

We keep talking about “using AI.” That’s the wrong goal.

The goal is to remove humans from repeatable loops as soon as the work becomes predictable. The moment a model is “good enough,” the work is no longer a craft. It’s an engineering problem: build the loop.

Call that moment the good enough signal.

Most companies will treat the signal as a stopping point: “Great, the team can do this faster now.” The companies that win will treat it as a starting point: “Great, now we can automate it.”

To make this operational, we need one metric that forces the right behavior:

Time to closed loop = time from “a human can do this reliably” to “the system does it automatically, with monitoring, escalation, and learning.”

If that time is long, we’re leaving leverage on the table. If it’s short, we compound.

There’s a simple ladder most work climbs:

1. Assist: the model drafts; the human decides.
2. Autopilot + review: the model acts; humans review every output.
3. Autopilot + sampling: the model acts; humans audit a small percentage.
4. Closed loop: the model acts; humans handle exceptions; the system improves.

Many teams get stuck at level 1 because it feels immediately helpful. Level 4 is where the economics change.

What “closed loop” requires (and why it’s executive work):

• Clear acceptance tests: not perfect, but explicit. If you can’t say what “good” means, you can’t automate it.
• Instrumentation: logs, traces, and outcomes. If it’s not measured, it can’t improve.
• Fallback paths: escalation to a human, rate limits, and safe defaults.
• Ownership: one accountable owner per loop, like a product.

We should treat automation as a portfolio. Every quarter, we pick a handful of loops that consume the most human attention and move them up the ladder deliberately.

Candidate loops to start with are the ones that are already semi-mechanical: internal reporting, churn analysis drafts, support categorization, post-incident summaries, compliance evidence gathering, release notes, and the countless “glue” tasks between tools.

The strategic reframe is this: humans aren’t here to be better typewriters. Humans are here to pick bets, handle novel cases, and design systems that make the routine disappear.

Proposed executive decision:

• Adopt time to closed loop as a KPI alongside speed and quality.
• Require a “loop plan” whenever a team claims a workflow is “good enough” on a non-frontier model.
• Fund the boring parts (evals, logging, fallbacks). That’s where the advantage is built.

Once we do this, “good enough” stops being a comfort and becomes what it really is: a signal to convert human effort into compounding automation.