A job aid is a short reference a person uses at the moment of doing a task, such as a checklist or decision table, so they need not rely on memory. For people who review AI agents, a good job aid sits beside the queue and tells them what to check on a held action before they approve it.
Why do job aids matter for agent reviewers?
Review is repetitive and the risks are uneven. A reviewer may approve fifty routine items and then meet one that needs a different check. Memory is weakest exactly then, late in a shift, on an item that looks like the others.
A job aid does not replace training. It catches the steps people know but skip under pressure. It also makes good practice consistent across a team, so two reviewers check the same things on the same kind of item.
What should a reviewer's job aid contain?
Keep it to one page. A useful one for held actions has five checks:
| Check | Question to ask | Where to look |
|---|---|---|
| Verdict | Which bound held this? | The verdict line |
| Sources | What facts did the agent rely on? | The source list on the item |
| Provenance | Is any key fact external or only declared? | The provenance label on each source |
| Limits | Is the action within my own approval authority? | The team's approver rule |
| Red lines | Does this touch anything I must never approve? | The team's red-line list |
Add the name of the person to call when in doubt, and how to pause the agent.
What does a job aid look like in practice?
Take a procurement team where an agent drafts purchase orders at depth 2. New reviewers keep missing that some orders reference a supplier quote that arrived by email. The team lead adds one line to the job aid: "Quote from email or web: external. Confirm with the supplier record before approving." Misses on that point stop within a fortnight, without another training session.
How is a job aid different from on-the-job training?
On-the-job training is the process of learning a task while doing real work, usually with a more experienced colleague. A job aid is a tool used during that work, and long after training ends. One builds the skill; the other supports it at the moment of use.
Whether staff can learn to supervise agents on the job depends partly on having good job aids, since they carry the checks a newcomer has not yet absorbed.
A job aid is also different from a procedure. A procedure describes the whole process and is often long. A job aid picks out the few steps people get wrong.
How do job aids relate to the job itself?
When agents take on part of the work, job descriptions change, and job aids should change with them. A reviewer's role written in an agent reviewer job description template lists the decisions they own; the job aid lists the checks for each. How job descriptions change when agents do part of the work covers the first half, and the argument that the agent operations lead is a real job explains who should maintain the job aids.
Which related terms should you know?
- Checklist: the most common form of job aid.
- Playbook: a fuller guide to a whole process, which may contain several job aids.
- Decision table: a job aid that maps conditions to actions.
For the training these tools support, see training teams for AI agents.
Questions people ask
Who should write the job aid?
An experienced reviewer, tested on new starters. If a newcomer cannot use it without explanation, rewrite it.
How often should a job aid be updated?
Whenever the agent's depth, sources or the team's red lines change, and after any near miss that a missing check would have caught.