What manager approval should look like
“Human in the loop” usually means a human rubber-stamping something they can’t inspect. Approval only counts when the evidence is legible.
Software loves to claim a human is in the loop. Look closer and the human is often just in the room — shown a conclusion, given a button, and blamed later. That is not approval; that is liability transfer.
Real approval has preconditions. The manager must see why: which invoice, which cost movement, which expiry window produced this recommendation. They must see the bounds: what the action can and cannot do, and where the floor sits. And they must have real options — approve, edit, reject, ignore — where every option is honored and remembered.
Rejection is the most underrated feature in operational software. A manager who says no is handing over exactly the context the system lacked. Treating that as training signal, not friction, is the difference between a tool that gets sharper and one that gets ignored.
The audit trail closes the loop: who approved what, when, on which evidence, and what actually happened after. Estimated impact and confirmed outcome stay separate columns forever, because trust compounds only when a system is honest about the difference.
Suggested, never blind. That is the standard. Anything less is autonomy with extra steps.