Approval Workflow (Human-in-the-Loop)
A required human decision point inside an agent workflow before a sensitive action is taken.
What is Approval Workflow (Human-in-the-Loop)?
An approval workflow pauses an agent before a high-impact step — sending a customer email, modifying a record, escalating a case — and routes the proposed action to a human reviewer. Approvals should be enforced in the orchestrator, not at the UI, so they cannot be bypassed by a different caller. See Human-in-the-Loop and AI Agent Governance.
What is an example of Approval Workflow (Human-in-the-Loop)?
An accounts-payable agent extracts an invoice and prepares a payment. A finance approver sees the supplier, amount, purchase order match, bank-account change signal, and source documents before authorizing that specific transaction.
How is Approval Workflow (Human-in-the-Loop) different from related concepts?
Human-in-the-loop means a person participates in the workflow. Human-on-the-loop means a person monitors and can intervene. An approval gate is the stronger control because execution cannot continue without an explicit decision.
What should enterprises evaluate for Approval Workflow (Human-in-the-Loop)?
- Place gates before payments, record changes, external communications, privileged access, and other material actions.
- Support approve, reject, edit, escalate, timeout, and delegation paths with a complete record of who decided what.
- Measure approval quality and workload so reviewers do not become a rubber stamp or operational bottleneck.
Read the full guide: Approval Workflow (Human-in-the-Loop) — in-depth article →
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