Human sign-off

In one paragraph

Human sign-off means a person reviews and approves what an AI system proposes before anything final happens. It is not an afterthought added once a system is built, but a stopping point agreed before the work starts: where in the process a person checks the system's work, what they are shown when they do, and what happens if they say no. Designed in from the start, it keeps a person in charge of the decisions that matter, while the system does the preparatory work around them.

Why it matters

An AI system can draft, summarise, or propose an action quickly, but speed is not the same as being right, and the consequences of an error are rarely evenly spread across every step a system takes. Deciding, before anything is built, exactly where a person needs to check the work means that oversight happens by design rather than by whoever remembers to look. It also means the system can be trusted to prepare work at speed, because a person remains the one who decides whether it goes any further.

How it works

• The stopping point, the moment where a person reviews before anything proceeds, is agreed before the system is built, not added afterwards.
• The person approving sees what they need to judge the decision: the draft or proposed action, the sources it was built from, and any relevant context.
• Approving or rejecting is a simple action, so the check does not become a task people avoid because it takes too long.
• Every decision, approved or rejected, is logged, along with who made it and what they saw at the time.
• Requiring a person to review certain kinds of AI decision is a common thread across most current rules and standards, including the EU AI Act.

What it looks like in practice

Some requests occasionally need judgement a system should not be making alone. That is the case worth designing for. The assistant prepares a draft response and shows the source material it drew from. A person reads both, and approves the response with a single action if it looks right, or edits and rejects it if it does not. The decision, and who made it, is recorded either way, so the record shows not just what was sent but who signed off on it.

How this connects to our work

Human sign-off is built into every automated workflow we build, and the approval gate is agreed with you before the build starts, so the checkpoint is already in place before a regulator or an auditor asks to see it.