Why Approval Steps Belong Inside Agent Workflows, Not Around Them

A common pattern we see when teams first automate a process: build the automation, then add a review step at the end so a human can catch mistakes before anything ships. It feels safe, but it quietly defeats the purpose of automating in the first place, because now every output still needs a full human review, just with extra steps in between.

The alternative is to design approval into the workflow itself, at the specific points where a wrong decision would actually be costly, rather than at the end of every run. That means identifying which steps are low-risk and reversible (safe to let the system execute) and which steps are high-risk or hard to undo (where a person should confirm before anything happens). This is a design decision made process by process, not a blanket rule.

Done well, this gets you most of the speed benefit of automation with the actual safety benefit of human oversight, because the people reviewing the work are looking at the few decisions that matter instead of rubber-stamping everything.