What does edit and approve mean?

Edit and approve is a review action in which a person changes an AI agent's held draft and then releases the edited version, so what goes out is the reviewer's correction rather than the agent's original. The reviewer takes ownership of the final wording or values. Both versions, and the reviewer's name, are kept in the record.

Why does edit and approve matter?

Reviewers have three basic choices on a held draft: approve as it is, reject it, or edit and approve. The third is where most of the value lies. It lets a reviewer fix a small error without throwing away good work, and each edit tells the agent's owner something about where the draft falls short.

It also carries risk. An edit can introduce an error the agent did not make, or quietly widen what the agent was allowed to propose. A reviewer who edits a refund upwards past the customer's limit has not approved the agent's draft; they have made a new decision that needs its own authority.

How does it work in practice?

A sound edit and approve process has a few rules:

1. Edit only what is wrong, and leave the rest; wholesale rewrites hide what the agent got right.
2. Record a reason for any edit that changes a value, a recipient or a commitment.
3. Re-check authority: if the edit changes the amount or the action, confirm it is still within the reviewer's own limit.
4. Second approval for the irreversible: an edit to a payment or a hard-to-undo action may need a second person; see two people should approve what cannot be undone.

Edits are also the raw material for improving the agent. Banked corrections show the builder where the brief or sources need work. Which roles may edit and approve money movements is covered in which roles should approve money moved by an AI agent.

What is an example?

A housing association's agent drafts responses to repair requests and holds those that commit to a date. A reviewer sees a draft promising a visit within two days for a non-urgent repair, where the standard is ten. She changes the date, notes "non-urgent category, standard ten days", and approves. The record keeps the agent's draft, her edit and her reason. When the owner reviews a month of edits, the same correction appears often, and the brief is changed to apply the standard. The edits did their job twice.

How is it different from approve and reject?

Approve releases the agent's draft unchanged; the agent's work stands. Reject stops it; nothing goes out, and the work returns to a person or the agent. Edit and approve sits between: the work goes out, but in the reviewer's version. The share of drafts that need editing is one of the most useful measures of an agent's quality, as reviewer edit rate is the honest measure of a draft argues.

It is also distinct from pausing an agent, which stops new actions altogether rather than correcting one.

Which terms are related?

• Held action: what the reviewer is editing.
• Banked correction: an edit recorded so it can improve the agent.
• Agent reviewer: the person making the edit.

For the wider topic, read AI agent skills by role.

Where the Academy fits

Human review and teaching the agent are both modules of the Pryme Intelligence Academy Operator track, so reviewers learn to edit precisely and to record corrections the agent's owner can use. The practicum then tests those edits on real review decisions, signed off by a Pryme assessor.