Classify actions by risk
Start with the actions the agent may take: read a document, draft an email, update a record, submit a form, trigger a workflow, call an API, or notify a customer. Mark each action as allowed, blocked, or approval-required.
Approval-required actions usually include external messages, record changes, payment or billing steps, customer-facing updates, healthcare workflow actions, financial workflow actions, and anything that is difficult to reverse.
Define what the reviewer must see
A reviewer should not approve a vague button. The approval request should show the tool name, proposed arguments, source material, expected result, affected system, affected user or account, and why the agent believes the action is valid.
For finance and healthcare workflows, the request should also show missing context, uncertainty, policy constraints, and whether the action is preparation-only or changes a real system.
Design refusal, edit, and escalation paths
Approval is not only yes or no. Reviewers often need to edit a draft, choose a safer action, ask for more source context, route the case to another owner, or reject the action with a reason the system can learn from.
The workflow should define what happens after rejection, timeout, repeated uncertainty, conflicting sources, or reviewer edits. These paths matter as much as the happy path.
Use logs to expand autonomy carefully
Every approval request should produce a log: source inputs, proposed tool call, reviewer decision, edits, rejection reason, execution result, and follow-up errors.
After a pilot, the team can review which low-risk actions were repeatedly approved without edits and which actions still need human judgment. This creates a measured path toward approval-by-exception instead of blind autonomy.