Lesson 5 of 6
Human in the loop: approvals, thresholds and escalation
9 min
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"Human in the loop" is easy to say and easy to get wrong. A confirmation button that people click without reading is not a control. This lesson designs the human checkpoints for Dan's accounts receivable pilot: where SAP builds them in, what Contoso adds, and how to make them work in practice.
What SAP builds in
- Confirmation before data changes. SAP's documentation for the Accounts Receivable Orchestration Agent: "For any action that modifies data in the system, such as creating a dispute case, the agent asks for your confirmation before proceeding."
- Final actions stay with people in monitoring agents: the Procurement Contract Compliance Monitoring Agent highlights and suggests, and "you must take all final actions."
- Authorizations. Agents act within the user's role-based permissions; assistants define which agents exist in a context, permissions decide who can use them.
- Transparency. The Source and AI Reasoning section shows what data the agent used.
What the process owner adds
SAP's controls are generic. The process owner turns them into rules for this process. Four design levers matter:
| Lever | Question it answers | Contoso AR pilot rule (illustrative) |
|---|---|---|
| Autonomy level | May the agent only suggest, act after confirmation, or act alone? | Suggest and act after confirmation only; no unattended actions in the pilot |
| Threshold | Above what value does a second person approve? | Dispute cases or credit memo proposals above $5,000 need Dan's approval as second approver |
| Escalation | When must the agent stop and hand over? | Customer on legal hold, disputed amount above the invoice, or missing billing document: stop and route to the AR lead |
| Segregation of duties | Can one person both trigger and approve? | The accountant who confirms a dispute can't also approve its credit memo |
Human-in-the-loop design for Contoso's AR pilot. The $5,000 threshold is a pilot rule set by Dan, not an SAP default.
- InformThe agent analyzes and explains; no proposals (account analysis)
- ProposeThe agent drafts an action; a person edits and executes it
- Act on confirmationThe agent executes after the user confirms (SAP's default for data changes)
- Act with approvalAbove a threshold, a second person approves before execution
- Act and reportThe agent acts alone within limits and reports; not in Contoso's pilot
Designing for the cases the agent shouldn't handle
Escalation rules are easiest to write from real exceptions. Ask the AR accountants for the last ten cases that went wrong or needed a supervisor: a fleet customer in a payment plan, a dispute that turned out to be a pricing error in the sales order, a complaint that mixed two invoices. Each one becomes an escalation condition or an evaluation case. A process owner who can name the exceptions is ready to supervise an agent; one who can't should run the discovery work again before going live.
Remember that the confirming user, not the agent, is accountable. Contoso's AR work instruction now says so in one line: "If you confirm an agent's proposal, you own the result as if you had entered it yourself." Training for the pilot users spends more time on reading proposals critically than on how to start the agent.
Making confirmation meaningful
Confirmation fatigue is real: after fifty correct proposals, people stop reading the fifty-first. Three habits keep the checkpoint honest. Show the reviewer the few facts that matter (customer, document, amount, reason) at the top, not buried in text. Sample confirmed actions each week and check them against the source documents; if errors slip through confirmation, the checkpoint isn't working. And measure the rejection rate: a rate near zero for weeks can mean the agent is excellent or that nobody is looking, and only sampling tells you which.
What would you do?
Six weeks into the pilot, the accountants confirm 99 percent of the agent's dispute proposals. Grace suggests removing the confirmation step to save time. What should Dan do?
- SAP builds in confirmation before data changes, user authorizations and visible sources; the process owner adds rules.
- Design four levers: autonomy level, value threshold, escalation conditions, segregation of duties.
- Keep confirmation meaningful: key facts first, weekly sampling, watch the rejection rate.
- Test every control in the quality system and keep the evidence.
Check your understanding · not graded
Lesson check
1. What does SAP's AR agent do before any action that modifies data?
2. In Contoso's pilot, who approves a dispute or credit memo proposal above $5,000?
3. Why sample confirmed agent actions each week?
4. Which design keeps segregation of duties in the AR pilot?