Approvals
An approval is a human-in-the-loop gate. When an agent is about to do something you have decided a person should sign off on, Hermiq pauses and creates an Approval — the action does not run until someone approves it. Pending approvals wait for you in the Approvals inbox (the Approvals item in the Hermiq navigation).
Why approvals exist
Autonomous agents run on their own — on a schedule, from a flow, from a webhook, or by calling a tool mid-conversation. Most of that is routine. Some of it isn't: sending an email, writing to a record, spending budget, invoking a high-blast-radius tool. Approvals let you keep the automation while putting a person in front of the actions that matter, so nothing irreversible happens unattended.
What can require an approval
Hermiq can open an approval at four points, and in every case it guarantees exactly one pending Approval per gated action (re-triggering never stacks duplicates):
| Gate | When it fires |
|---|---|
| Scheduled run | A schedule configured to require approval will not dispatch its run until approved. |
| Flow-triggered run | A run started from a flow trigger pauses at the gate. |
| Webhook run | A run started from an inbound webhook pauses at the gate. |
| Tool call | A tool the agent wants to invoke mid-run pauses until approved — including any tool your guardrail policy classifies as confirm. The tool is not invoked until a matching approval exists. |
The confirm tool classification is set per organisation in Settings →
Guardrail policy, so an admin decides once which tools always need a human, and
every agent inherits it.
The lifecycle of an approval
- Requested — the agent reaches a gate; a
pendingApproval is created, capturing what wants to happen (the source, the agent, the prompt, and for a tool call thetoolIdand its arguments) and when it was requested. - Decided — a reviewer opens the Approvals inbox and approves or rejects it, optionally with a reason. Hermiq records who decided, when, and why.
- Consumed — on approval, the paused action proceeds exactly once; the approval is marked consumed so it cannot be replayed. On rejection, the action never runs.
Every one of these steps is written to OpenRegister's audit trail, so an approval decision is a permanent, attributable governance record — not a transient UI state.
Where to find it
- Approvals inbox — the Approvals navigation item lists everything waiting on you, with approve / reject actions.
- Audit export — approval decisions are part of the EU AI Act audit export (see Incidents and Compliance), alongside the run records they gated.
Related
- Guardrail policy (Settings) — classify a tool as
confirmto route every call through the approval gate. - Incidents — when something does go wrong, record it as an incident linked to the agent and its runs.