What is an AI Approval Workflow?

Unlike a traditional approval workflow triggered by a human submitting a request, an AI approval workflow is triggered by the agent itself deciding an action is needed — send this email, delete this record, transfer these funds — and the system intercepting that intended action before it runs. The agent's proposed action, along with its reasoning, is surfaced to a human reviewer who can approve, reject, or modify it. This pattern is what lets an autonomous agent operate with real tool access without becoming a blank check: the agent can reason and plan freely, but anything crossing a defined risk threshold (financial, irreversible, externally visible) stops for review rather than executing on the agent's judgment alone. Getting the threshold right matters — gate too much and the agent becomes unusable; gate too little and the safety net is theater. As agents get more capable, these gates increasingly need to be genuinely un-bypassable at the system level (enforced server-side, not just a suggestion in the agent's prompt), since a sufficiently capable or adversarially-prompted agent can otherwise talk its way around a purely soft, prompt-level restriction.