Approvals: Reviewing Agent Actions Before They Happen
Cortex includes an approvals system that lets you review and approve specific actions before your agent carries them out. This gives you an extra layer of confidence, particularly for high-stakes actions like sending communications to clients.
How approvals work
When you add a tool to your agent, you can choose to require approval before that tool is used. When the agent reaches a point where it wants to use an approval-gated tool, it will pause, generate the proposed action (for example, the full text of an email), and wait for a human to review and approve it.
Once approved, the agent continues and carries out the action. If rejected, the agent will not proceed with that action.
When to use approvals
Approvals are most useful for actions that are external-facing or difficult to reverse. Common examples include:
Sending emails - Review the content before it reaches a client.
Sending SMS or WhatsApp messages - Check the wording before it's delivered.
Creating or modifying records - Verify the data before it's written to your CRM.
For internal or low-risk actions - such as reading data, searching records, or creating internal notes - approvals are usually unnecessary and will slow the agent down.
Who can approve?
When setting up an approval, you can specify who is authorised to approve actions:
Yourself - Only you can approve.
Specific team members - Choose a subset of people within your organisation.
This means you can delegate oversight. For example, a branch manager might approve outgoing emails while a senior negotiator approves valuation-related communications.
Where approvals appear
You don't need to be inside Cortex to review and approve actions. Approvals are surfaced in two places within Street:
The Cortex inbox. Street includes a dedicated Cortex inbox where any action awaiting approval will appear. From here you can review the proposed action and choose to approve, edit and then approve, or reject it.
On the entity itself. If you navigate to a property, applicant, or other record in Street that has a pending approval, Cortex will automatically surface it. So if you're already looking at a property record and there's an email waiting for sign-off, you'll see it right there - no need to go to your inbox.
Approvals in test mode
In test mode, agents simulate all write actions regardless of approval settings. Approvals become active when you move the agent to live mode. See our Testing and improving your agent help article for more on test mode.
Street is constantly being updated. This can mean that some of these articles become slightly out of date. If you spot something that looks a little bit different to your Street account, please let us know on the live chat so we can get it updated!