Work out why before you clear anything. A sudden rise in an agent's held items has a cause: more volume, a change to the agent, a lost source, absent approvers or someone probing it. Diagnose that, sort the queue by deadline and harm, add approvers from the roster and keep every decision individual. Never lower thresholds to shrink the queue.
What is a held-item spike, and who owns the response?
Held items are actions an agent has drafted that wait for a named person, explained in held: what it means for AI agents. A spike is a jump well above the normal daily volume. It matters because the queue is a control: when it overflows, approvers start approving quickly, then in batches, then without reading, and the control turns into a formality.
The operations lead who owns the held queue owns the response. The process owner decides on anything that changes the agent or its limits. The agent operations lead investigates causes in the agent itself.
What usually causes a spike?
- Volume: month-end, a product campaign, a market event, a backlog from an outage elsewhere.
- An agent change: a brief or source change that makes the agent less certain; or a certification run that falls short and lowers the agent's depth, turning work it used to finish into held drafts.
- A lost source: a system of record is unavailable, so the agent cannot confirm facts and holds instead.
- Approver absence: items arrive at normal pace but nobody clears them; see how to cover approver absence for an AI agent's held work.
- Manipulation: a wave of crafted requests designed to push actions into the queue in the hope they are approved without scrutiny.
What are the steps, and who acts at each one?
- Agent, depth 1: raises the alert when the queue exceeds a set multiple of its normal level or the oldest item passes a set age.
- Agent, depth 1: profiles the spike: which capabilities, which triggers, which bound held each item, which channels and customers, and when it started.
- Person, agent operations lead: diagnoses the cause from the profile, checking recent changes, certificate status, source availability and roster coverage.
- Person, operations lead: sorts the queue by deadline, value and potential harm, with vulnerable customers and regulatory deadlines first.
- Person, operations lead: adds approvers from the roster, only people with the right authority.
- Person, process owner: decides on intake: keep going, slow it, or route new cases of the affected type to manual handling until the queue recovers.
- Person, approvers: decide items one by one. No bulk approval for money movement or hard-to-undo actions.
- Person, process owner: fixes the cause through change control if it lies in the agent, its sources or its limits.
- Agent, depth 2: drafts customer updates where delays affect promised timescales; a person approves them.
| Step | The agent does | Depth | Stays with a person |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alert | Flags the spike | 1 | Nothing |
| Profile | Breaks the spike down | 1 | Nothing |
| Diagnose | Nothing | none | Naming the cause |
| Sort | Nothing | none | Setting priorities |
| Add approvers | Nothing | none | Choosing authorised people |
| Intake | Nothing | none | Slowing or rerouting work |
| Decide items | Nothing | none | Individual approvals |
| Fix cause | Nothing | none | Change through change control |
| Customer updates | Drafts messages | 2 | Approving them |
What evidence does each step leave?
The alert and profile; the diagnosis with its cause; the priority order used; the roster changes; the intake decision; each item's decision with approver identity and time; the change reference for any fix; and the customer messages sent. Time per decision during the spike, compared with normal, shows whether approvers kept reading.
Which controls keep the queue a control?
No bulk approval. Select-all on held payments defeats the hold. If bulk handling is allowed at all, limit it to low-value, depth 3 items and sample afterwards.
No threshold changes under pressure. Raising a limit so fewer items are held is a change to the agent and goes through change control, with testing.
Authority holds. Extra approvers must have the right limits. A spike is not a reason to let juniors approve senior items.
Watch for rubber-stamping. As rubber-stamping is the hidden risk in held items argues, the danger is not the delay but approvals that mean nothing.
What should you measure?
Queue size and oldest item by hour during the spike, time per decision against normal, rejection rate during the spike against normal, items past deadline, and time to diagnose. A falling rejection rate during a spike is a warning that people have stopped scrutinising.
Where does it usually go wrong?
The queue is cleared before the cause is known. If the cause is a faulty change, clearing the queue approves the fault's output.
A depth drop is missed. A short run lowered the agent's depth overnight, the queue fills, and nobody connects the two.
Manipulation is mistaken for volume. A burst of similar requests from new customers looks like demand. Profile it before approving.
The daily routine breaks. Spikes are easier to handle when the normal routine is strong; see how to work through an AI agent's held queue each day and the held queue daily review checklist.
Where Pryme fits
In Pryme, each held item names the bound that held it, so a spike can be profiled by cause in minutes: a lapsed certificate looks different from a customer limit or a source problem. Approvals are filed individually with the approver's identity. The deployment cycle is in deploying an AI agent: train, shadow, certify, widen.
Questions people ask
Should we pause the agent during a spike?
Not usually, since paused cases go to manual work, which is often slower. Pause or slow intake when the cause is a fault in the agent, or when the queue cannot be worked safely.
Can another agent help clear the queue?
An agent can sort, summarise and prepare items for approvers. It cannot approve them, because the hold exists to put a person's judgement on each one.
How do we plan for predictable spikes?
Forecast held volume from past month-ends and campaigns, book approvers in advance, and run the agent's re-certification away from known peaks so a failed run does not coincide with one.