NRV AI Training Needs a Human Handoff Skill
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s September 22 call for federal AI guardrails puts employment, privacy and cybersecurity at the center of the state’s AI debate. In the New River Valley, that debate should quickly become a workforce question: what should people actually learn before employers ask them to rely on AI at work?
New River Community College offers a useful starting point. Its Pathways to Professions program helps students clear a practical barrier to employment by covering the cost of licensure, certification and credentialing exams in fields ranging from health care and skilled trades to information technology and business.
AI creates a new credentialing gap. A worker can know how to prompt a system and still be unprepared for the moment when its recommendation looks plausible but is wrong, incomplete or outside the worker’s authority.
Local training programs and employers should teach a human handoff skill. Before accepting a consequential AI recommendation, a worker should be able to answer three questions: What evidence did I check? What would justify overriding the system? Who owns the decision if the stakes exceed my authority?
That skill can be trained with short exception drills. Give someone a realistic AI output containing a subtle error or uncertainty. Ask the person to identify what needs verification, consult an approved source, then decide whether to accept, modify, reject or escalate the recommendation. The goal is not to slow routine work. It is to make good judgment observable before a mistake reaches a customer, machine, patient, account or public system.
Employers should also match the handoff rule to risk. Low-risk drafting or brainstorming can move quickly with ordinary review. Medium-risk work should require a documented check against a trusted source. Decisions involving safety, cybersecurity, significant money, quality control or people’s rights should have a named human owner.
This approach fits the New River Valley’s workforce needs because it builds on skills employers already value: evidence checking, accountability and knowing when to ask for help. It also gives leaders a better adoption metric. Instead of asking only how many employees used an AI tool, measure caught errors, justified overrides and timely escalations.
Virginia is debating how to govern AI at the state and federal level. The New River Valley does not need to wait for every policy question to be settled before preparing workers for responsible use. It can start by making human judgment a skill people practice, test and carry from the classroom into the workplace.
Gleb Tsipursky, PhD, a behavioral scientist, CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, and author of The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results (Georgetown University Press, 2026). https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/aibook
