Approvals over email work until you automate.
Once AI starts preparing drafts and routing work, ad-hoc approvals become a bottleneck and a risk surface.
Start here:
Why ad-hoc approvals fail in production
- No deterministic routing (who approves what changes per person)
- No evidence prerequisites (approvers approve blind)
- No status history (decisions are lost in threads)
- No safe reruns (retries duplicate side effects)
What policy-based approvals enable
- Deterministic routing and escalation
- Evidence prerequisites before approval is requested
- Audit trails that connect decisions to evidence
- Safe reruns and repeatable controls
Where AI fits
AI should:
- prepare decision packs
- extract and normalize evidence
- route exceptions with reason codes
AI should not:
- silently approve commitments
- bypass prerequisites
- overwrite decision history
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