Human approval for professional services
Human approval is a named person agreeing to a specific output before it has an effect. The useful version is narrow: approval on anything that reaches a customer, moves money, changes a price, or commits the organisation to something. Everything else runs without a gate, which is what keeps approval meaningful rather than ceremonial.
( The Detail )
What this control means in practice
Write down who approves what, what they are actually checking for, and what happens when they are on leave. An approval step nobody can describe is a delay, not a control. A fair check is whether the approver has ever rejected anything; if not, the gate is probably being waved through.
Realistic for this kind of team
Professional services firms hold client material under confidentiality expectations that predate any AI question, and often under engagement terms that say where information may go. The first control is contractual: check what you have already promised clients before deciding what a tool is allowed to see.
Realistic practice separates drafting from disclosure. Using AI to structure an argument, summarise your own notes or interrogate a document you already hold is different from uploading a client file to a service you have not assessed. That line is worth writing down, because juniors will otherwise infer it.
How to approach it
Begin with the decision rather than the tool. Name the recurring judgement this affects, the information it depends on, and the person accountable for acting on the result. That framing keeps the first build small enough to inspect and useful enough to matter.
Keep a human review point in the loop until the quality and the failure modes are understood. A system that shows its working - what it drew on, where it is uncertain, and what it deliberately left alone - is one a business can keep running after the initial build.
( Next Step )
Start small enough to review, but on a workflow important enough to show whether a better system is worth building.