The agency dial: how to give agents responsibility without losing oversight

The question DM leads ask most often is not "how accurate is the SDTM mapping?" It is "who is responsible when something goes wrong?" The agency dial is the product primitive that makes that answer coherent — not just as a policy statement, but as an observable, auditable, adjustable property of the system.

TrialNexus implements three operating modes, per agent, per study: Full oversight, Supervised autonomy, and Monitor only. Every change to the dial setting is logged with the identity of who changed it and when.