A refund request lands in your support agent's queue. The knowledge-base match comes back at 0.91 confidence — comfortably above your drafting threshold, with a clean article on refund policy attached. The agent should still not send that reply. If that sentence sounds wrong to you, this post is the argument for why it's right.
Autonomy is a dial, not a switch
Most teams frame human-in-the-loop as a binary: either the agent sends email on its own or a human approves everything. The framing fails in both directions. Full-auto on everything means the one bad reply ends up screenshotted in a board deck; full-review on everything means you've built an expensive draft generator that saves nobody time.
The better model is a dial set per message type, not per agent. The same support agent can run fully autonomous on order-status lookups, draft-and-approve on billing questions, and hands-off-escalate on anything with legal weight. The email support agent recipe implements exactly this, with two independent gates deciding where the dial sits for each message.
Gate one: confidence
