Approval Gate
An approval gate is a checkpoint in an agentic workflow that pauses execution until a human reviews and approves the AI's proposed action.
Approval gates are how you ship autonomous AI without losing your job. They sit at the boundary of irreversible or high-stakes actions: sending an external email, charging a card, posting to social media, hiring or firing. The AI does the work; the human signs off. The design choice is which gates to keep and which to dissolve as trust grows. Most teams start with everything gated and progressively auto-approve categories the employee has demonstrated competence on — same as how you'd onboard a human hire.
Example
AI SDR drafts an outbound email. Approval gate fires: founder sees the draft in Slack, hits ✅, the email sends. After 200 approved drafts in a row, the gate is removed for that template.
How OpenLabor uses it
OpenLabor lets you set approval gates per mission, per tool, or per dollar threshold. New employees start fully gated; you dissolve gates as they earn trust.
Won't approval gates slow everything down?
At first. The point is to start safe and graduate. The gates that matter at month 1 are usually unnecessary by month 3.
Where should gates always stay?
Anything irreversible (sending money, deleting data) and anything reputation-bearing (external comms to large audiences) should usually keep a gate, even if it's instant.
Related: agentic-workflow, mission, guardrails, ai-employee.
AI Labor Glossary