AI should get decisions ready for you, and a person should make the ones that carry real weight. In every system we build, a person makes the final call on seven kinds of decision. Money going out or being promised, legal commitments, messages sent in your name to new people, complaints, regulated advice, exceptions to your own rules, and anything that changes or deletes records in bulk. Everything around those can be automated.
There's a practical reason for this as well as a moral one. A business is responsible for what its automated systems say and do. In Moffatt v Air Canada (2024), a tribunal held the airline liable for wrong information its chatbot gave a customer. So "the AI said it" won't get you off the hook.
1. Money going out, or being promised
Refunds, discounts, credit notes, payment terms, anything that commits the business to money. AI can draft the refund, work out the amount and attach the evidence, and then a person clicks approve.
2. Legal commitments
Contracts, agreements, terms, anything someone could hold you to later. AI can fill in the template from the deal details and flag what's changed from your standard version, and then a person signs it off.
3. First messages to new people in your name
Cold outreach, and the first reply to someone who's never heard from you. AI can do the research, the draft and the personal touches. Until you've read enough of its drafts to trust them, a person approves each one, because the first message is where getting the tone wrong costs you the most.
4. Complaints and upset customers
When someone's upset and gets a bot reply, a lot of times they just get more upset. AI can spot the complaint, pull the history together and suggest a reply. A person has the conversation.
5. Regulated advice
Medical, legal, financial, and anything else your industry regulates. AI can answer general questions from approved information and book a call with a qualified person. It doesn't give advice.
6. Exceptions to your own rules
"Can I pay in five instalments instead of three?" "Can you start next week instead of next month?" Rules are what make automation safe, and an exception is just a case the rules don't cover. So AI sends the request to the person who can decide, with the context attached.
7. Bulk changes and deletions
Merging hundreds of contacts, deleting old records, changing every price. AI can get the list ready and show exactly what will change, and then a person checks a sample and confirms. These are the mistakes that are hardest to undo.
How to keep review from becoming a bottleneck
If a review step sits in someone's inbox for three days, there's no point having it. What works is this.
- One queue. Every item waiting for a decision shows up in one place, not spread across email, chat and three tools.
- Everything needed to decide, on one screen. The draft, the evidence and the suggested action. The easy ones should take seconds to approve.
- Clear owners. Each type of decision has a named person, with a backup.
- Approve, reject or ask for changes, with a short note, so you can see which drafts pass and tighten the instructions for the ones that don't.
- Nothing gets sent twice. Approving an item twice, or retrying after a glitch, must never send the message or payment twice.
- Loosen it on purpose. When a type of draft has been approved without changes many times, you can decide to let it run with spot checks instead. That's a decision you make based on what you've seen, and it shouldn't just happen by default.
What this looks like in practice
For MRM Group, a property investment company, we built human approval into the points where financial promotion rules or an AI suggestion could have consequences. Everything before those points, like capturing the enquiry, gathering documents and getting the next step ready, runs on its own. The MRM Group case study has the rest of the build.
Our own operating platform works the same way. AI turns a call summary into tasks and a draft follow-up email, and then a person checks the draft before it goes out.
So every time, we let AI do the gathering, drafting and routing, and we keep a person on the decisions that matter. You get most of your time back and you still keep the judgement where it counts.
