Human Intervention
Pause a run for a person to review and approve, then resume automatically.
Some workflows need a human in the loop — an approval, a manual data entry, a sign-off before anything irreversible happens. The Human Intervention action pauses a run at a chosen point, hands a person a form to complete, and resumes once they submit. It turns an otherwise fully automated rule set into one that can wait on a decision.
The flow at a glance
- A run reaches a Human Intervention action and stops, recording a pending intervention.
- A secure, time-limited link is generated for a reviewer.
- The reviewer opens the link, signs in if they are not already, fills out the form, and submits.
- The submission is checked, and the configured continuation rule set is queued to resume, recorded against the person who answered.
Configuring the action
When you add a Human Intervention action you configure how the pause behaves:
- Continuation rule set — the rule set that runs to resume the workflow once the reviewer submits.
- Form — the fields the reviewer sees, authored as a runtime form. Existing context values can be passed through so the reviewer has what they need to decide.
- Link expiration — how many hours the link stays valid (default one hour). It cannot be set longer than the run remains available to resume.
- Maximum uses — how many times the link may be submitted (default one).
- Generated link context key — the context key that receives the generated link, so an earlier action (for example an email) can deliver it to the reviewer.
- Allow AI agents to submit — whether an AI assistant connected over the MCP server may submit the form on your behalf (on by default). Turn it off for approvals that must be completed in person through the web link. See AI agents and the MCP server below.
Reviewing a request
The link opens the intervention form in the app. Answering it takes two things: the link itself, which is what identifies the request, and a signed-in account in the organization and environment that raised it. An approval nobody can be named for is not an approval anyone can rely on later, so the reviewer’s identity is part of the record rather than an optional extra.
Reviewers do not need to be signed in before the link arrives. Opening it while signed out takes them through sign-in and then lands them back on the form, so an emailed link still works as a single click.
A person outside the organization cannot answer a request, and forwarding the link does not give them the ability to. If the people who approve your workflows are not already members, add them to the organization — see Organizations — before you route approvals to them.
On success the page shows the correlation id of the resumed run. A request is refused, and the reviewer is told why, when:
| Condition | What the reviewer sees |
|---|---|
| The link is invalid | Not found |
| The link has expired | Link has expired |
| The maximum number of uses is reached | Already used the maximum number of times |
| The original run is no longer available | Link has expired |
| The reviewer is not signed in | A prompt to sign in, because approvals are recorded against the person who made them |
| No environment is selected yet | An instruction to select the environment that raised the request, then reopen the link |
| The reviewer has a different environment selected, or belongs to a different organization | An instruction to switch to the environment that raised the request, then reopen the link |
| The reviewer’s session has expired | An instruction to sign in again and reopen the link |
AI agents and the MCP server
A rule set containing this action can be called from the MCP server, but because the run pauses, the MCP call returns the generated link rather than the final result. What happens next depends on Allow AI agents to submit:
- On (the default) — the connected AI agent can read the pending form — its fields and any prefilled values — and submit it on your behalf, resuming the workflow. You are still the one answering; you just do it by telling your assistant instead of opening the web link yourself. The submission is recorded against the MCP credential the agent is using.
- Off — the form can only be submitted through the web link. An agent can still read the form but cannot submit it, so from the agent's point of view the call is fire-and-forget.
Agent submissions follow the same rules as the web form: an expired link or one at its maximum uses is rejected, and each accepted submission consumes a use.
Resuming the run
When a valid submission is accepted, the reviewer's form input becomes context and the configured continuation rule set is queued in the same environment. From there it proceeds like any other run, and the whole sequence stays stitched together under one correlation id in the logs. On a Shared or Free tier environment, the resumed run counts against your monthly run allowance like any other.
The resumed run names both the action that paused and the person who answered it, so “who approved this?” is answerable from the run history months later without going looking for the email that carried the link.