Illustrative · composite scenario
From a mispriced quote that slipped out unattended, to an approval layer the ops team can put their name to.
Redgate quote hundreds of repeat freight jobs a week. Each one starts as an email and ends as a line in their transport system — re-keyed by hand, twenty minutes a time.
So they bolted an AI copilot onto it. It reads the email, drafts the quote, and — to save the twenty minutes — some drafts went out without anyone checking them. Mostly fine. Until a fuel surcharge was read from the wrong month and a quote went out 12% under the lane’s floor price. Nobody saw it until the customer accepted it.
Their WFK audit had already flagged this: strong on speed, weakest on governance — an agent acting with no gate and no record. The ops manager, Dana, put it plainly: “I can’t put my name to a number I never saw.” That sentence is the whole brief.
Not access to rebuild anything — just enough to understand the decision. The pilot’s raw material:
The obvious fix is to make the copilot a better estimator. I didn’t. A better guesser is still a guesser — and Dana still can’t stand behind a number she didn’t see. The problem was never accuracy. It’s accountability.
So I weighed three shapes, out loud, with them:
Turn it off. Safe — and it throws away the twenty minutes a quote it just gave them back. Nobody wants that trade.
Automate it fully with pricing rules.Brittle the first time a lane isn’t in the table — and it still puts a machine, not a person, on the hook for the price.
Design the moment of approval.The copilot drafts; a person confirms in a glance; every decision is recorded. We built this one — not because it’s the clever answer, but because it’s the only one Dana can defend to her MD when a quote is questioned.
And here’s the actual craft: the win isn’t the gate, it’s making the gate cost five seconds, not five minutes. Show the draft, the one reason it landed there, the single thing worth checking — and one button. Get that wrong and people route around it. Get it right and oversight stops feeling like friction and starts feeling like cover.
Not a new system — the layer in between. First, where it sits:
The whole boundary in one line: I design the middle. Their systems keep working exactly as they do — the approval layer just sits on top and holds the moment a human says yes.
The deliverable, made visible — the approval screen a Redgate approver would use
Matched to 3 prior quotes on this lane. Surcharge from the current fuel table. Margin 18%. Source: Acme email, 08:41.
Grey bars are placeholder content — the labels, numbers, the flag and the gate are the real design. The agent drafts; the flag surfaces the one thing worth checking; a person approves; the record writes itself.
Not a mysterious bundle — a working thing and four documents. Everything below is theirs to keep: if I vanish, nothing stops and anyone can extend it.
The working screen above, running on their real quote flow — draft, reasoning, the gate.
Owned by RedgateThe append-only log — who approved what, when, and why — plus a sample trail Dana can hand an auditor.
Owned by RedgateA short document: which actions are gated, the thresholds (the floor-price rule), and what escalates to whom.
Owned by RedgateHow it works and how to maintain it as lanes, rates and volumes change — in plain language, for their team.
Owned by RedgateThe design documented so any builder — theirs or a future one — can rebuild or extend it. Your no-lock-in guarantee.
Owned by RedgateThat’s the real pay-off — not a productivity stat, but a change in what the business can trust. The same AI, the same speed — but now every price carries a name, every decision leaves a record, and Dana can defend any quote in the room. The design didn’t remove the human; it gave the human back control they can actually exercise in five seconds. Watch the flag catch the floor-price miss above: that’s the solution doing its job, in one glance.
Illustrative composite · not a real client · the shape of a real Draft-and-Approve pilot
WFK — we design the moment a person says yes.