Five-Step AI Workflow with Human Oversight
Each step shows the workspace, what the AI completed, and what still needs human review.
Steps 3 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 Technology Company Built Request Handling That Answers Repeat Questions on Its Own
Every internal request, from the moment somebody asks to the moment the work is done and on the record. The agents capture each request, read it, answer the ones the record already answers, run the approved ones across the connected systems, and hand a person only what is theirs: a signature where money, access or data moves, and the rules the whole thing runs by. Five stations, run as a loop: what station 5 learns about where requests went wrong changes how station 2 routes them on Monday.
What Was Broken
What We Built
Five stations and 13 subagents. Each subagent carries its own tasks and its own refusal.
How It Runs
Request Intake
Nobody is asked anything hereAgents collect every request off the form, the shared channel and email, attach each one to its requester, merge the duplicates, and hold anything missing a fact the work cannot start without. Nothing waits on a person here. A held request is never started and never dropped.
Reading and Answering
Nobody is asked anything hereAgents read every request end to end, name the ask in one line, answer the questions past requests and policy pages already answer, and route the rest onto the workflow their kind has always used. Nothing waits on a person here. A request no workflow covers is labelled with its reason, not sent to somebody to work out.
Approval
A person answers hereAgents build one packet per decision: the ask, the cost, the systems it touches, what the policy says, and what this requester asked for before. A person signs, and nothing moves until they do. This is where a person works. Everything else exists so that three packets, not forty requests, reach this screen.
Fulfillment
Nobody is asked anything hereAgents run each approved step across the connected systems in order, confirm every step against the system it changed, and hold a run whole when two systems disagree about what is true. Nothing waits on a person here. A run whose systems disagree is held whole, with nothing undone quietly.
Reporting and Tuning
A person answers hereAgents build the weekly report from the request record, flag the numbers moving against their own pattern, propose the routing rules that would have stopped the week's mistakes, and list the access nobody uses. A person accepts or rejects each rule. How requests route, and who holds access, 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:
An employee quits and their open requests keep moving. The agent grants access or ships a change to an account nobody owns, and nobody notices until an audit finds it.
The record does not hold the answer, so the agent fills the gap with something plausible. The requester acts on a made-up fact and the mistake carries their name, not the agent's.
Approvals fire on a timer instead of a signature. A payment goes out because Friday came, and the person whose name is on the decision never saw it.
A step fails mid-run and the agent undoes part of the work on its own. Half the change stays in place, the log says nothing failed, and the next request builds on a system in a state nobody chose.
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.
request-arrivalsrequests/intake/<req-id>.jsonhold-incomplete-requestrequests/intake/**, requests/held/**, the staff directory read-onlyread-and-routerequests/read/<req-id>.json, answers/<req-id>.jsonno-workflow-covers-itrequests/read/**, answers/**, the record read-onlypacket-and-decisionrequests/packets/<req-id>.mdawait-your-decisionrequests/packets/**, everything else read-onlyrun-the-stepsrequests/runs/<req-id>.jsonsystems-disagreerequests/runs/**, the connected systems through their own APIsreport-and-tunereports/week-<date>.json, rules/proposed/<rule-id>.jsonaccept-rule-changereports/**, rules/proposed/**, the record read-onlyStack
Every system this agent reads or writes.