AI autonomy × Institutional adaptation

Responsible advisory use turns out to cost more than the software: real accountability requires records, training, escalation paths, and audit staff, so this is the one corner where cheap AI is expensively surrounded. That expense recreates a new power center — governance leads, prompt stewards, model-risk teams — who don't do the work, they decide what counts as legitimate work, and smaller organizations either can't afford the wrapper or rent it from the same vendors selling the tools it's meant to govern.

This isn't a frontier-agent scenario — credit scoring, welfare clawbacks, and fraud detection have run delegated-and-processed for years, appeal rights and audit trails bolted on after the fact. Formalizing delegation buys legitimacy, and legitimacy is what gets sold. Certified agents, warranties, and liability products turn admitted delegation into an insurable asset class — and whoever defines the insurable form quietly decides what delegation is allowed to look like everywhere else.

Comprehension stopped scaling with throughput long before anyone admitted delegation had happened: the human still signs everything, but AI raised the volume faster than review capacity could follow, so the signature increasingly certifies a document nobody actually read. The real cost lands a cohort later — reviewers trained entirely on already-drafted work never build the judgment the signature is supposed to guarantee, so the fallback competence disappears exactly when it would be needed to catch a bad call.

The tell isn't a policy that says delegated — no one admits that — it's a worker who clicks accept, forwards, or fails to override fast enough for the override to matter, absorbing blame for a system they didn't design or staff. Frontline workers usually clock the fiction before executives or regulators do, because they're the ones being blamed for it; but the arrangement persists because it suits everyone with the power to name it, so it tends to end only when litigation, scandal, or an insurer's refusal forces the question into the open.