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Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) comprises not only models, but full socio-technical systems involving data pipelines, instrumentation, human-machine interfaces, deployment architectures, and organizational processes for design, monitoring, and evaluation. Using a systems-oriented analytical framework, this paper argues that despite accelerating advances in AI capabilities, human capital remains the enduring and dominant system constraint. Human interfaces define throughput limits in areas such as prompt engineering, data-stream curation, adjudication of model outputs, and the orchestration of hybrid automation workflows including robotics, scraping, and digitization. Synthesizing emerging research across human-AI interaction, machine-learning lifecycle management, organizational adoption, and adult learning theory, we present a socio-technical evaluation model that characterizes key human factors—trust calibration, output-quality sensemaking, expertise depth, feedback latency, cognitive load, and metacognitive skill development—as performance-shaping mechanisms within AI-enabled systems. We show how organizational structures, bias susceptibility, retraining constraints, and interface design co-determine system stability, error propagation, and optimization ceilings. Finally, we propose key design principles for workforce development grounded in these systems design principles, constraint reduction, and continuous evaluation. This perspective reframes humans not as passive users, but as core system components whose competencies, limitations, and adaptive capacities constrain the performance envelope of optimized AI systems.

A link to a video related to this presentation can be found below in the Additional Files section.

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Session 5.mp4 (645625 kB)
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