Agents that cite their sources and hand decisions to people
By CTC Smart Tech · 15 August 2026 · 5 min read
Two design rules make AI assistants deployable in real operations: every answer has a source, every action has an approver.
Our document agent prototype reconciles an invoice against a packing list. It finds the two-unit gap, shows both source documents and stops. A person explains the gap and approves.
That is the pattern for every assistant we ship: retrieval with citations, so the user can check; and an approval step for anything that writes or sends data, so accountability stays with a person.
It also changes how we measure quality. Instead of asking whether the model is right, we ask whether the user could verify it in under a minute. That is a number we can test before launch.
Assistants built this way are slower to demo and faster to approve.
