How to cover approver absence for an AI agent's held work

Name a deputy for every approver, at equal or higher authority, in advance. When an approver is absent, the agent moves their held items to the deputy, never to someone with a lower limit and never to the person who requested the work. If both are out, items escalate to a manager. Nothing is ever approved by default.

What is the problem, and who owns it?

Held work is an action an agent has drafted that waits for a named person: a refund above a limit, a payment, a letter to a vulnerable customer. The concept is set out in held: what it means for AI agents. If the named approver is on holiday, ill or in a two-day workshop, those items sit. Customers wait, deadlines pass, and someone eventually approves a pile in a hurry, or a well-meaning colleague without authority does it.

The operations lead who owns the held queue owns absence cover. Team leaders keep the roster current. HR or the calendar system supplies absence data. The agent applies the rules.

What are the steps, and who acts at each one?

1. Person, operations lead: builds the roster. For each type of held item, a primary approver, a deputy and an escalation manager, each with an authority limit. The named approver roster template gives the columns.
2. Person, operations lead: writes the cover rules: items move only to someone with equal or higher authority; never to the requester or to anyone involved in the case; never to an agent; never approved because time ran out.
3. Agent, depth 1: reads absence data from HR records and calendars each morning, and on changes during the day.
4. Agent, depth 3: reassigns items from an absent approver to their deputy, adding a note explaining why it moved and any questions the original approver had already raised.
5. Agent, depth 3: escalates to the escalation manager when both primary and deputy are absent, or when an item nears its deadline.
6. Agent, depth 1: stops creating new holds of a type if no eligible approver is available for it, and routes those cases to a person's manual queue instead.
7. Person, deputy: works the items with the same view and the same checks as the primary.
8. Person, operations lead: reviews the roster weekly and before holiday periods.

What evidence does each step leave?

• Roster: a versioned roster with names, deputies and authority limits, approved by the operations lead.
• Cover rules: a signed rule set, usually part of the approver absence cover plan template.
• Read absence: the absence data used each day.
• Reassign: a reassignment log with item, from, to, reason and time.
• Escalate: escalation records with the trigger.
• No approver: records of hold types suspended and cases routed to manual work.
• Decide: the approver's identity and authority on each decision.
• Review: dated roster reviews.

Which controls make cover safe?

Authority never goes down. An item worth more than the deputy's limit goes to someone with a higher limit, not to the deputy.

Independence is kept. The deputy must not be the person who raised the request, nor someone involved in the case, such as a relationship manager approving their own client's refund.

No silent approval. Expired items are refused and returned to a person, not executed.

Context travels. The deputy sees why the item was held, the sources, and anything the primary approver already asked or noted.

Return on the approver's return. Items moved to a deputy stay with the deputy until done, so nothing is approved twice or lost in a handback.

What should you measure?

• Items reassigned per week, by approver.
• Time to decision for reassigned items, compared with normal.
• Escalations, and how many came from gaps in the roster.
• Hold types suspended for lack of an approver.
• Decisions by someone outside the roster. The target is none.

Where does it usually go wrong?

The deputy is also away. Teams name deputies from the same small group who take leave at the same time. Check overlapping absence before holiday periods.

Deputies lack authority. The deputy is the team's most junior member. They can approve small items only, and the rest escalate. Set deputies by authority, not convenience.

Calendars are wrong. Absence is not recorded, so the agent assigns items to someone on a beach. Let approvers mark themselves unavailable in one step.

A backlog builds and is cleared in a rush. After a long absence, the deputy faces hundreds of items. Plan for it like any surge; see how to handle a spike in an AI agent's held items.

Cover is not part of the daily routine. Absence cover works when it is built into how the team works through an AI agent's held queue each day, not bolted on.

Where Pryme fits

In Pryme, a held item names the person who must decide it, and approvals are filed with their identity in an append-only record. That makes the reassignment trail visible and keeps approval with named people whatever the absence. More in deploying an AI agent: train, shadow, certify, widen.