Conductor, Not Reviewer: Klaviyo's CMO Wants to Retire the Term 'Human in the Loop'
Jamie Domenici, Chief Marketing Officer at Klaviyo, says the shift to autonomous agents hands marketers the baton and raises what the job demands.
"Humans have to be the conductor. AI is the orchestra."
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"Human in the loop" has become the phrase every marketing leader reaches for when they want to sound AI-responsible. In short, it's a promise that the machine won't be left running unsupervised. Jamie Domenici thinks that promise gives away the wrong thing. She's the Chief Marketing Officer of Klaviyo, the publicly traded marketing-automation company that calls itself an autonomous B2C CRM and has shipped AI agents that generate full marketing campaigns from a single prompt.
When she pushes back on the industry's favorite safety phrase, she's describing the org she already runs. Domenici came to Klaviyo from a CMO position at GoTo, after a decade in marketing leadership at Salesforce. Writing on LinkedIn, she laid out why the phrase bothers her. "I don't love the phrase 'human in the loop,'" she wrote. "It makes the human sound like a reviewer at the end of the process."
"Humans have to be the conductor. AI is the orchestra," she continued. A reviewer signs off on work that's already finished. A conductor decides what the work is.
A more demanding job
The lazy version of the AI-and-marketing conversation treats the human as a final approval step bolted onto an otherwise automated pipeline, there to catch the machine's mistakes. Domenici's framing puts the human at the front of the process instead of the end. "Our job isn't just approving AI-generated content," she wrote. "It's setting the strategy, protecting the brand, understanding the customer."
Volume raises the standard. Whatever direction an agent receives gets applied across every campaign it produces, so strategy that passed as adequate at one email a week now shows up everywhere at once. The upfront thinking reaches further than it used to, which is where the job has gotten harder.
From producing to directing
The work shifts from producing output to directing it. Klaviyo builds toward that deliberately, wiring its marketing and service agents to the same customer data so execution runs on the machine and intent stays with the team. The company selling the autonomy is the same one arguing its customers' marketers matter more because of it.
"Human in the loop" undersells what the role becomes, since a loop is something a person can be cut out of. A conductor can't be. The autonomous era hands marketers the baton and dares them to be worth it.
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