Five-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 5 need a person. Step 3 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 Food Service Company Built Order Forecasting with Human Approval Before Purchases Are Placed
Tomorrow's order for every perishable line, from the moment the night's numbers land to the moment the day is scored. The agents load and check every feed, forecast every item at every site, draft and test the order, watch the day run against it, and hand a person only the lines where money leaves on their signature. Five stations, run as a loop: what station 5 learns about today's misses is the forecast station 2 publishes tomorrow, and the rule station 1 checks the feeds against.
What Was Broken
What We Built
Five stations and 12 subagents. Each subagent carries its own tasks and its own refusal.
How It Runs
Feed Intake
Nobody is asked anything hereAgents collect the night's numbers off every till, supplier confirmation, weather feed and waste log, match each one to the day it belongs to, and hold any feed that arrives broken or short. Nothing waits on a person here. A held feed is never fed to a forecast and never silently filled in.
Demand Forecasting
Nobody is asked anything hereAgents fold the checked feeds into each item's record, work out tomorrow's number for every line, publish the ones the history carries, and flag the items where the history is too thin to publish on. Nothing waits on a person here. An item that cannot be called gets a flag with its reason, not a guess with a straight face.
Order Setting
A person answers hereAgents write tomorrow's order for each supplier, cut a line where its shelf life carries less than the forecast asks, show what the plan does on a kind day and an unkind one, and leave blank every line that is yours to set. This is where a person works. Money leaves on this signature, and everything upstream exists so that six lines, not sixty, need their eyes.
Day Watching
A person answers hereAgents compare the tills against the forecast through the day, watch the deliveries against their windows, classify every flag by what it is, and hold any corrective order for a person instead of placing it. Nothing waits on a person here while the day tracks. A flag that needs money spent stops and asks.
Forecast Scoring
A person answers hereAgents score every published number against what the till sold, count the waste at close against the items over-called, trace each big miss to its cause, and propose the changes that would have cut the misses that repeat. A person accepts or rejects each change. How tomorrow gets called is not something an agent changes 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:
A till stops writing at 21:05 and the system fills the gap in. Every forecast downstream now rests on sales that never happened, and nobody knows which ones.
An item with two weeks of history gets a published forecast like any item with two years. The buyer cannot tell a guess from a call, so both get ordered with the same confidence.
The system sends the order and the business pays for it. When the number is wrong, no person ever agreed to it, and the first review happens after the money is spent.
A site's feed goes quiet and the system reads it as a day of zero sales. Tomorrow's order for that site shrinks toward nothing while the site is still selling.
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-intakedata/day/<date>/<feed>.jsonhold-broken-feeddata/day/**, data/held/**, the source systems read-onlydemand-forecastforecast/<date>/<item>.jsontoo-little-historyforecast/**, data/day/** read-onlyorder-draftorders/draft/<date>-<site>.mdawait-your-commitorders/draft/**, everything else read-onlyfloor-watchwatch/<date>/<flag-id>.jsonhold-corrective-orderwatch/**, orders/draft/**, the live tills read-onlyscore-and-learnchanges/proposed/<change-id>.json, reports/day-<date>.jsonaccept-forecast-changechanges/proposed/**, reports/**, the history read-onlyStack
Every system this agent reads or writes.