Human Review Gate

What It Is

A human review gate is an explicit checkpoint where a person must approve before an agent proceeds. Marketing outputs are public-facing or revenue-adjacent, so every agent workflow must place gates at canonical positions rather than running fully autonomously to publication.

The Three Canonical Gates

  1. Gate 1 — Pre-draft / strategy approval: review the brief, ICP, or campaign premise before generation begins ("does this brief make sense?").
  2. Gate 2 — Pre-publish / pre-send approval: review the generated output for brand-safety, accuracy, and approval before distribution.
  3. Gate 3 — Exception escalation: flag to a human whenever confidence falls below a set threshold, mid-flow.

In the canonical pipeline these wrap the action sequence: trigger → input validation → GATE 1 → action → output validation → GATE 2 → distribution, with GATE 3 firing on low-confidence anywhere in between.

How It Applies to Marketing Factory

Gates are what make agent autonomy safe: they convert "the agent published something wrong" into "the agent proposed something a human rejected." They are the operational expression of the agent-ownership-boundary — the agent owns drafting, research, and mechanical execution up to the gate; the human owns the publish decision (cf. drafts-only-client-comms). Gate placement is a required field of every agent-workflow-pattern, and the exception-escalation gate is the first line of defense against agentic-failure-modes. The discipline: gate the irreversible, public, or revenue-affecting step, not every step — over-gating destroys the automation's value.

Referenced from: agent-workflow-templates