Five-Step AI Workflow with Human Oversight
Each step shows the workspace, what the AI completed, and what still needs human review.
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Estimates are directional and based on stated assumptions. All names, organizations, and identifying details have been anonymized in accordance with our confidentiality agreements.
How an Enterprise HR Services Company Built a Documents Agent That Holds Uncertain Fields for Human Review
Every document that reaches the operation, from the moment it arrives to the moment its record is posted and its file is complete. The agents sort it, read it, fill its fields, post it into the payroll and HR systems, and hand a person only the fields they were not sure of. Five stations, run as a loop: the corrections a person makes at station 3 change how station 2 reads tomorrow, and what station 5 finds missing changes what station 1 holds.
What Was Broken
What We Built
Five stations and 10 subagents. Each subagent carries its own tasks and its own refusal.
How It Runs
Arrival Sorting
Nobody is asked anything hereAgents collect every document off every route, name each one's form type, match it to the employee file it belongs to, and hold anything partial, unreadable or unknown. Nothing waits on a person here. A held document is never guessed at and never quietly dropped.
Data Entry
Nobody is asked anything hereAgents read the typed text, the tables and the handwriting off every page, fill the fields that form type carries, score their own certainty on each value, and leave open what they would otherwise be guessing. Nothing waits on a person here. An open field is an open field, not a filled one.
Exception Review
A person answers hereAgents put each open field on one screen with the page region that produced it beside it, ranked by the deadline its document carries, and log every correction a person makes. This is where a person works. Everything else exists so that 61 fields, not 6,650, reach this screen.
System Posting
Nobody is asked anything hereAgents post each cleared record into the payroll or HR system its type feeds, read every posting back out, and hold anything the receiving system rejects with the rejection attached. Nothing waits on a person here. A rejection is held with its reason, not retried until it goes through.
Record Keeping
Nobody is asked anything hereAgents close the trail on every document, file the original beside the record read off it, check each employee file for what its client's contract requires, and put every deadline on a clock. Nothing waits on a person here. A file found short is flagged the day it is short, and lands on the review queue, not in an audit.
Where a Person Decides
Operating Model
This changes how work flows through the team.
What Transfers, What Must Be True
Failure Modes
What breaks this pattern:
A document that matches no form gets guessed onto the closest one. The wrong data then sits inside a record that looks right, and nobody knows to check it.
A value the reader was not sure of goes into the system with the same weight as one it read clean. Downstream, nobody can tell which numbers were solid and which were guesses.
A rejected record gets retried until the receiving system accepts it. The rejection was the one warning that the record was wrong, and retrying past it puts a bad record in your books.
A file short a required document looks complete until an auditor opens it. By then the gap is months old and the original paper is much harder to recover.
Directional Outcomes
What the agent counts, and the station that counts it.
These counts are the tallies from one monitored run of the agents. They are not monthly or annual totals.
What Runs Where
Every step names the subagent that does the work, the record it writes, the thing that raises a question for a person, and what it is allowed to touch. This is drawn from the source, not from a diagram somebody kept in sync by hand.
doc-intakedocs/intake/<doc-id>.jsonhold-partial-or-unknowndocs/intake/**, docs/held/**, the sources read-onlyread-and-extractdocs/fields/<doc-id>.jsonfield-below-the-linedocs/fields/**, docs/intake/** read-onlyreview-queuedocs/cleared/<doc-id>.json, rules/proposed/<rule-id>.jsonawait-your-clearancedocs/cleared/**, rules/proposed/**, everything else read-onlysystem-postpostings/<doc-id>.jsonreceiving-system-rejectedpostings/**, the payroll and HR systems through their own interfaces, docs/cleared/** read-onlyfile-and-trailtrail/<doc-id>.json, files/<employee-id>/index.jsonrequired-document-missingtrail/**, files/**, the history read-onlyStack
Every system this agent reads or writes.