Build a workflow with an approval

A workflow with a human decision in the middle is the shape you reach for when the work has a draft, a review, and an action — and you want a person between the draft and the action. The run pauses as Waiting for input until someone answers; the next step only fires on a green light. This walk builds a daily-summary workflow that way, and you meet both human gates on the road: approving the AI editor's proposal, and answering the paused run.

You need an Editor role and one agent that produces a draft (the first useful agent from Build your first agent works fine). The conceptual side lives in Automation concepts and Approval concepts; this walk is the end-to-end mechanic.

Before you begin

Confirm three things. Your role is at least Editor — workflow editing is gated to Editor and above. You have a draft-producing agent ready to call; without it the draft step has nothing to invoke. And you can answer the review yourself — the paused run waits for a human, and in this walk that human is you.

Step 1 — Open a workflow in the editor

Workflows live inside the automation they power: open the automation and its Editor tab is the workflow, with the step graph on a canvas. For this walk, open a workflow you own or one your org's task-ops pack provisioned — anything you are allowed to edit works, because the AI editor builds the new definition for you either way.

Step 2 — Describe the workflow to the AI editor

Toggle the AI editor on the canvas toolbar and describe the whole shape in one message:

Every weekday at 08:00, have the agent summarise yesterday's unread customer messages into one paragraph, then ask a human to review the draft, and only send the approved text to the team channel.

The AI editor answers with a proposal card — Create workflow with the step count, or Update workflow when it reworks the one you opened. Nothing touches the definition while the card is pending: expand it, check the steps it lists — an LLM step for the draft, the review pause, the send — and approve it. The change is applied and versioned like any manual save.

Step 3 — Attach the schedule

Switch to the Triggers tab and click Add schedule. Pick the Every day preset and adjust the cron to weekdays (0 8 * * 1-5) — or describe the timing in plain language and click Generate to let the AI write the cron. Workflow variables pre-fills from the workflow's input schema; leave it as proposed. The row appears with an Active toggle already on.

Step 4 — Run it and answer the review

Back in the editor, open Test workflow, paste the input JSON the panel proposes, and click Execute. The panel mirrors the run step by step: the draft step fires, then the run pauses — Waiting for input — and the review arrives as a form card holding the draft. Fill it and click Submit response to approve, or Reply differently to push back in free text; the run resumes with your answer and the send step fires.

Open the Executions tab and expand the run: the journal shows one entry per step — the draft the agent produced, who answered the review and what, and the send with its output. That journal is the audit trail; the same record appears for every future scheduled run.

Where this fits

Draft, decide, act — with the decision a human's — is the smallest useful workflow-with-approval, and you built it without placing a single step by hand: the AI editor proposed, you approved, the run asked, you answered. The same shape scales — add a second review before a destructive step, or let Approvals in workflows show you the other gates around a workflow. For the vocabulary behind definition, trigger, and execution, Automation concepts is the page this walk assumed.