What a person must still decide.

Approve decisions, not actions

The question is not "is this action risky" but "does this specific case depend on something the agent cannot see?" Sending the ninth-day reminder is never that case. Agreeing a payment plan always is, because it depends on a relationship and a judgement about whether the money will arrive.

Three answers, and the third is the important one

Approve once, refuse, or change the rule so the agent stops asking. Without the third, a queue only grows. If you have approved the same shape of request eleven times, the rule is wrong and the agent should have been allowed to do it — that is a finding, not an inconvenience.

Make the request decidable in fifteen seconds

A good approval states what the agent wants to do, why, what the limit is, and what it is asking for instead. "Approval needed" with a link moves the work to the human rather than reducing it, and a queue of those is a queue that gets cleared without being read.

Name a role, never one person

An approval that only one named individual can decide fails the first time they are on holiday, and the usual fix — somebody shares a login — destroys the record of who decided. Route to a role, with more than one holder.

Measure the queue, not just the agent

Two numbers tell you whether your approval design is working: how long items wait, and what proportion are approved. A queue where 98% are approved after four hours is a delay dressed up as a control. A queue where a third are refused is doing real work.

• How long does the median item wait?
• What proportion are approved unchanged?
• Which requests recur often enough that the rule should change?
• Has anything been waiting long enough to have gone stale?

Some things are not approvals

Routing a capability that should never be exercised through an approval queue does not make it safe — it makes it somebody's Tuesday afternoon, and people approve what they are asked to approve fifty times. Refunds, deletions and permission changes are refused outright on this platform for exactly that reason.