Use case 04 · Document Review & Approval
Nobody approved it. It shipped anyway.
A document goes out for review. It comes back as four copies with overlapping comments, two of which contradict each other. Someone merges them. Someone else did not reply at all, and their silence gets read as a yes. When it matters later, no one can say which version was approved, or by whom.
For work where the approval is consequential — a policy, a contract, a decision paper, a specification.
PDF · the eight stages, the two human decision points, and the recovery branches
The workflow
The eight stages of approving one document
The rule the whole chain rests on: no comment may disappear. An unresolved comment is not a closed comment — it travels to the decision owner attached to a specific version, with the positions, the grounds and the consequences of deciding either way.
Fix the question and the baseline
People carry this
The decision owner states the goal, the source document, the question to be decided, what counts as done, and the deadline. That exact version becomes the baseline everything after it refers to.
Assign roles and access
People carry this
Decision owner, document editor and reviewer are assigned as separate roles with separate rights. Role, participant type and access permission are three different things and are recorded separately.
Collect independent comments
People carry this
Reviewers read one named version and leave comments anchored to specific text. Independent first: comments are collected before they are reconciled, so agreement is not manufactured by whoever commented first.
Merge the register, revise the document
People and AI agents together
Duplicates merge in a way that keeps disagreement visible, and the editor issues a new version. Every comment ends in a stated outcome: integrated, not integrated with a reason, superseded, or needs a decision.
Send the question a person must answer
People and AI agents together
Only questions that sources and rules cannot settle reach a human — with the exact question, the options, the consequences, the grounds, where the parties disagree, what remains uncertain, and the one action required.
Assemble the approval package
AI agents carry this
For each comment the reader can open the original passage, the change made, or the reason it was declined. The package travels with the version, not separately from it.
Approve one specific version
People carry this
The decision owner receives the document together with every unresolved comment, and approves, rejects, or returns it for revision — explicitly, per comment. Agreement between AI agents is not approval, and neither is no reply.
Close the cycle
People and AI agents together
The outcome carries the actions, the people responsible, and the conditions that start them. Anyone entitled to can open the history of any significant change or decision afterwards.
Where the manual work goes
Where the manual work goes
Each row is work a person is doing right now because the workflow does not do it. That is the cost the first case is measured against.
| Problem | What a person does today | What the workflow change does |
|---|---|---|
| Different versions in circulation | Compare files by hand and carry comments across. | Every significant record names an immutable version and its checksum. |
| Participant, agent owner and authority are conflated | Work out too late who could actually decide. | Participant type, agent owner, process role and access rights are shown separately. |
| A comment, or its meaning, is lost | Hunt for the old email and reassemble the room. | The original comment, a reversible merge of duplicates, and the final outcome are all kept. |
| “Addressed” with nothing to show | Re-read the whole document and argue about interpretation. | Either the specific change or a reasoned refusal, with its grounds. |
| A dispute with no clear question and no owner | Hold the same meeting again. | A named person gets a neutral statement of the question, the options and the consequences. |
| An edit after approval | Investigate which version was actually accepted. | A new version requires a new review and its own separate confirmation. |
The working result
What you end up holding.
One approved version that cannot silently change, a comment register where every comment has a stated outcome, and a history that separates who proposed, who changed, who released, who decided and who approved.
What this does not claim
This is a product hypothesis assembled from two project calls and checked against current MVP material. It is not a description of automation that already exists, it is not an API contract, and it does not change accepted MVP decisions. The full document-centric history view and addressed follow-up questions to a past participant are explicitly not approved MVP capabilities; in a manual pilot the register is kept as a versioned file.
Detail from the RecPlace Agent Rooms document-approval customer-journey map v0.4 (2026-09-04), status DRAFT_FOR_REVIEW_NOT_APPROVED.
A bounded first case
Bring us this workflow.
Twenty minutes, one recurring workflow, and an honest answer about whether a bounded first case is worth running. If it is not, we will say so.
PDF · the eight stages, the two human decision points, and the recovery branches