Last week I polled my network: would you let a Dynamics 365 AI agent post a journal entry or release a purchase order without human review? 46% said yes, with guardrails. 31% would allow it only for low-risk items. 23% said a human is always needed.

Small sample, 13 votes, so treat it as directional. But the split matches the conversations I have with clients. And here is what struck me… we already had some of this in the mainframe days!

We Have Done This Before Y’all!

Marc Rohde of Andis Company made the pertinent point in the comments: his team auto-released purchase orders from a legacy MRP system (mainframe) back in the 90s. And even without software involved, companies give humans guardrails too. We call them signing limits and workflow approvals.  This tracks with my experience even in 2007 replacing a mainframe with a Client/Server ERP (AX).

Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management does this today. Batch jobs post invoices overnight. Master planning can automatically firm planned orders into real purchase orders. Nobody calls that reckless, because the rules are deterministic and the outcomes are audited. The challenge is the acceptance and adoption by humans!  It takes time to become comfortable.

What Has Changed?

Large language models are non-deterministic, but they can author programs that are deterministic. Instead of following a fixed rule, and the same input may not always produce the same output – after all it is a fancy form of text prediction or autocomplete. That is the real difference.

We need to keep the guardrails we were using with humans, for AI now:

• Dollar thresholds, exactly like a signing limit for a new buyer
• Approved vendor and account lists that are enforced, AI or not
• A full audit trail of what the agent did and why (we did this with humans too)
• Humans review any exception or purchase above the threshold, perhaps with sampling below the threshold too

Treat the agent like a new hire: give it a signing limit, audit its work, and raise the limit as it earns trust. You would not give a new buyer unlimited PO authority on day one. You also would not make them ask permission for every $50 order… because that defeats the purpose of hiring an employee (or agent in this case).

Start Smaller Than You Think

You do not need to automate every journal entry or transaction to get value. Even 10% automation of the low-risk, high-volume documents carries real ROI, and it builds the evidence you need to continue building the automation. You eat an elephant, one bite at a time (or one byte at a time!).

The 23% who said “never” are right to be cautious. I appreciate the cautious stance, and sometimes I feel like I’m in this group.. It really depends on the topic.

If you were setting the first limit for an agent, where would you start: dollar amount, document type, or vendor list?