Policy answers with named escalation

The situation

An operations team answered the same internal policy questions every day. The policy library was difficult to read, so the harder questions waited behind easy ones.

What we deployed

The answering agent has least-privilege access to the policy library and nothing else. It answers only what the documents support and cites the clause it drew from.

Questions outside the library are refused. Answers below the confidence threshold go to a named support lead. Corrections are saved as labelled examples. The manifest allows no answer without a citation.

The five gates at work

1. SCOPE

   Policy library, read-only · answers with a cited clause

2. ROLE

   Answer policy questions · never act outside the policy library

3. LIMITS

   A spend limit on each run, set in the signed manifest

4. REVIEW

   Below the confidence threshold → named support lead

5. SEAL

   Each answer with its clause in the audit trail

What changed

People only get answers the system can back up. The support lead sees only the questions that need a person.

When someone later questions an answer, the record shows the answer and the clause it cited.

If your team runs a process like this one, start with a teardown of it. We measure its volume and exception rate, and you keep the document.

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