Should a person approve an AI agent's work before it goes out?

Why the approval step matters

• Accountability doesn't move. If a wrong quote goes to a customer, someone at your company answers for it. That person should be the one who said yes.
• Approval is fast. Reading a draft and signing it takes seconds. Writing it from scratch took the time. The approval step keeps almost all of the savings.
• It's how a team comes to trust the agent. The person who used to do the work by hand checks every output for the first few weeks. They see where it's right and fix where it's wrong, and the run log keeps both. By the end of a pilot they aren't trusting a black box. They've been checking it the whole time.

What it looks like in practice

Human in the loop means a person reviews or approves an AI system's work at set points before it takes effect. In practice, a good setup names each of those points in advance and says who checks what.

• A named role signs. Each agent has a role that signs before work goes out, and you choose who.
• A run log. Every step the agent takes is written down, and you can read it any day.
• An off switch. You or the builder can pause or stop the agent at any time.
• Changes are signed too. A change to what the agent does is agreed and signed like the first plan.

What to ask any vendor

• "Who on our team approves the agent's work before it goes out?" The answer should be a role on your side, designed in from the start, not bolted on later.
• "Where can we read what the agent did?" If there's no run log you can read, mistakes are hard to trace.
• Watch for "no human needed". It means there's no step where a person approves. When the agent is wrong, nobody saw it first.

How DH Studios does it

We build AI agents for operations. Automation follows rules; agents make the calls a person checks. Every agent we build comes with the controls above, and the details for yours are set in the Drawing, the one-page plan you sign before anything is built.

A person approves every hand-off.