Operations insight

Human-in-the-loop: where to place approval gates

The goal is not maximum human review. The goal is precise human review at the points where the cost of a bad autonomous action exceeds the cost of delay.

Gate on impact

Put approvals before money movement, customer commitments, legal exposure, or irreversible data changes.

Gate on uncertainty

Route low-confidence or low-evidence cases to review instead of letting the workflow improvise.

Gate on novelty

When a workflow sees a new pattern, policy conflict, or missing context, treat it as an exception case until it is classified.

How to avoid reviewer bottlenecks

  • Show the reviewer the recommendation, source evidence, and exact proposed action on one screen
  • Separate low-risk confirmations from high-risk approvals so experts only see the difficult cases
  • Feed override reasons back into the evaluation harness and control rules every week