Preference Elicitation

A schedule looks reasonable until someone asks why. Why did this nurse get the night shift? Why was this invoice routed for manual review? Why did the configuration engine reject one product bundle and approve another? In many operational systems, the answer is not a single rule. It is a chain of constraints: availability, capacity, dependencies, exclusions, thresholds, and the occasional policy clause someone wrote in 2017 and nobody wants to touch. ...

TL;DR for operators Most agent demos show the easy part: the model calls a tool, gets results, and returns something plausible. The harder part is less cinematic. The user starts with an incomplete request, reveals constraints in fragments, phrases preferences indirectly, changes emphasis mid-conversation, and expects the system to somehow keep up. This is where many supposedly “smart” agents begin to look less like assistants and more like interns with excellent API access. ...