Seven-Step AI Workflow with Human Oversight
Each step shows the workspace, what the AI completed, and what still needs human review.
Steps 3, 4 and 7 need a person. Step 4 is waiting for approval right now. Click it to open the full walkthrough.
Estimates are directional and based on stated assumptions. All names, organizations, and identifying details have been anonymized in accordance with our confidentiality agreements.
How a Growth-Stage E-commerce Company Built Store Automation with Human Approval Only Where Money Leaves
Everything a product needs between the supplier's feed and the shopper's order. The agents check the feeds, write the listings, move the prices inside their bands, count the cover, place the products in front of the shoppers who buy their kind, and chase the carts that stall. A person gets only the calls that spend money or cut margin: a price below its floor, a purchase order, a change to the rules. Seven stations, run as a loop: what station 7 learns about today's misses is the band station 3 prices inside tomorrow.
What Was Broken
What We Built
Seven stations and 14 subagents. Each subagent carries its own tasks and its own refusal.
How It Runs
Feed Intake
Nobody is asked anything hereAgents collect every product record off every supplier feed, match each one to the product it updates, merge the duplicates, and hold any record a listing could not honestly be built on. Nothing waits on a person here. A held record is never listed from and never repriced from.
Listing Writing
Nobody is asked anything hereAgents write each product's title, description and search terms from the supplier's sheet, check every claim against that sheet, and publish only the listings where everything holds. Nothing waits on a person here. A listing that fails the fact check stays unpublished and surfaces at station 7.
Price Setting
A person answers hereAgents watch what Contoso and Fabrikam charge for the same items, move each price inside the band its floor and ceiling allow, and hold at the floor anything the market says should go lower. A person decides the floor calls. A price below the floor is a margin decision, not a reprice.
Stock Reordering
A person answers hereAgents project each product's sell-through, count the days of cover left, and draft each purchase order at the quantity the projection supports, with the cash it ties up shown beside the stockout it prevents. A person signs every order. Money leaves on a signature, never on a projection.
Merchandising
Nobody is asked anything hereAgents fill the also-bought and goes-with slots from what shoppers actually bought together, and put each standing promotion in front of the segment its rule names, every offer checked against the discount ceiling first. Nothing waits on a person here. An offer past the ceiling is never sent, and an offer on an unsettled price never runs.
Cart Recovery
Nobody is asked anything hereAgents track every cart that stalls, name the step the shopper stopped on, and send the reminder the policy already writes, with the thing that stalled them answered up front. Two messages, then the chase ends. Nothing waits on a person here. A recovery that would need a discount past the ceiling is never sent.
Day Review
A person answers hereAgents check every product touched today against where it ended, trace each lost cart to the step it died on, and propose the price band, promotion or feed rules that would have stopped the misses that repeat. A person accepts or rejects each rule. A price band, a promotion rule and a feed rule are the owner's, and no agent changes them quietly.
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:
Without the hold, a record missing a size or a material gets listed anyway. The shopper gets a product the page did not describe, and you pay for the return.
A price mover that follows the market past the floor makes margin decisions nobody approved. One week of undercutting sells a whole category at a loss before anyone reads a report.
An agent that sends purchase orders spends real money on its own projection. A bad demand guess arrives as stock you did not want, with an invoice attached.
With no cap on the chase, every abandoned cart gets message after message. Shoppers mark you as spam, and the ones who might have come back do not.
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.
feed-checkcatalog/intake/<sku>.jsonhold-bad-recordcatalog/intake/**, catalog/held/**, the feeds read-onlywrite-listingcatalog/listings/<sku>.mdreject-unsupported-claimcatalog/listings/**, catalog/intake/** read-onlymove-pricespricing/moves/<sku>.jsonhold-at-floorpricing/**, the competitor watch and order history read-onlydraft-reordersstock/orders/<po>.jsonawait-po-signaturestock/**, the sales and delivery history read-onlyfill-the-shelfshopfront/placements/<date>.jsonwithhold-stacked-offershopfront/placements/**, stock and pricing read-onlychase-cartscarts/chase/<cart-id>.jsondiscount-past-ceilingcarts/**, the mail sender, listings read-onlyread-the-dayrules/proposed/<rule-id>.json, reports/day-<date>.jsonaccept-rule-changerules/proposed/**, reports/**, the day's record read-onlyStack
Every system this agent reads or writes.