sipi.bot vs human approval workflows
Slack notifications, email threads, and manual approval queues work for five transactions a day. They break when your agent makes 50 decisions a minute. Here's the gap.
When humans are the bottleneck
A human approval workflow — DM the manager, wait for an emoji reaction, check a spreadsheet — adds minutes of latency to every purchase decision. That's fine when an agent buys one thing a day. It's catastrophic when a travel agent books three flights in a retry loop at 2am.
| Dimension | Human approval workflow | sipi.bot |
|---|---|---|
| Decision latency | Minutes to hours | Under 5ms |
| 24/7 coverage | Only during business hours | Always on |
| Runaway-loop protection | None — 40 small buys fly through before a human notices | Velocity rules stop at the 11th request |
| Consistency | Depends on who's on call and how awake they are | Same rules fire every time, deterministically |
| Audit trail | Scattered across Slack DMs and email threads | Tamper-evident log of every decision and its reason |
| Cost | Human ops time — expensive, doesn't scale | $99/mo flat; one person reviews the exceptions only |
The hybrid model: rules decide, humans handle the exceptions
sipi.bot doesn't eliminate the human — it moves the human from gatekeeper to exception-handler. APPROVED transactions fire without anyone looking. BLOCKED transactions never reach a card. FLAGGED transactions go to a lean approval queue where a human reviews maybe three items a day instead of three hundred.
Frequently asked
Do I still need a human approval step?
For most transactions, no. The firewall auto-approves everything within your rules. FLAGGED transactions — the borderline cases — go to a human. You review exceptions, not every purchase.
What if I want approval for every transaction?
Set the approval_threshold rule to $0 — everything gets FLAGGED and goes to the human queue. But most teams find that setting per-transaction caps and daily totals catches 95% of risk with zero human latency.
How does the approval queue work in practice?
When a transaction is FLAGGED, it appears in the dashboard. A human clicks Approve or Deny. The agent receives the result and acts on it. The queue is asynchronous — the agent waits for the decision.