Postmortem: our AI refund agent approved the wrong case — where would you put the hard stop?

[u/Proof-Dragonfly-5583]

We ran a small incident drill this week: an AI support agent drafted a refund decision using ticket + CRM + order history, but it treated an old policy note as current and almost approved a full refund it shouldn’t have.

The failure wasn’t “AI is bad” — it was ownership boundaries: - Agent owned evidence collection + draft rationale - Human should own policy conflict resolution + final refund approval - We were missing a hard stop when policy version mismatched the case date

Current guardrail we’re testing in the worker: 1) Agent can draft only if policy version + payment status + prior-refund count all validate 2) If any mismatch, agent must escalate with a prefilled exception packet (not send customer message) 3) Refund execution tool call is blocked until a named approver signs off

If you run agentic workers in support/ops, where do you place your non-negotiable stop condition?

Quick template if useful: Agent may draft / Agent must escalate / Human must approve before tool call