# What a person always decides

Auto can remove human approval from permitted customer operations, including approved pricing and commercial conversations. What remains human-owned is the authority itself — changing rules or approved business facts, undoing a person's do-not-contact or suppression choice, and destructive account/data actions. Hard safety and provider refusals are not approvals a person can simply click through.

- **Status:** Available
- **Audience:** both
- **In the app:** #/needs-you, #/approvals
- **Last verified:** 2026-09-10
- **Canonical:** https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/product/what-a-person-decides/

## The reserved decisions

| Decision | Why it is reserved | Where you make it |
|---|---|---|
| A price, discount or commercial term outside approved authority | Auto may quote what the business has explicitly approved. It never invents a price, discount, SLA, warranty or unsupported commitment. | Business profile / approved Knowledge |
| A refund, payment or legal statement the approved sources do not support | Auto removes the approval step, not the requirement for grounded authority. Unsupported claims are refused rather than guessed. | Business authority / Knowledge |
| Clearing a do-not-contact or suppression entry | The entry exists because somebody asked not to be contacted. Removing it is the one action that can undo a person's own choice, so it is kept away from automation entirely. | The suppression list |
| A first approach or call when a narrower rule asks first | Auto normally permits these without approval; a contact, endpoint or channel exception can deliberately restore Review for the specific case. | Autonomy rules / Needs You |
| What is true about the business | Knowledge is the workspace's own material. Connect grounds answers in it; it does not decide the facts, and it refuses rather than filling a gap. | Knowledge and the facts editor |
| What the rules are | Autonomy modes, blocked topics, standing instructions, business hours and spend caps are the boundary itself. Nothing inside the boundary may move it. | Connect Rules and the autonomy screens |
| Whether Connect runs at all | The runtime switch stops new work immediately, per channel, without changing a single setting. | The runtime control |
| Removing data | Forgetting a memory, deleting a record and closing an account are irreversible in ways an automatic decision should not be. | The record, or a request through the Trust Centre |

## When an approval still exists

Auto itself creates no human approval for permitted work. An approval exists only when a broader or narrower rule deliberately uses Review, or when an individual approval gate has been turned back on. An unanswered approval expires; timeout auto-send is still refused for money, law or commitments that were explicitly configured to wait for a yes.

Hard refusals are different. A blocked contact, missing consent, suppression, unsupported claim, exceeded spend cap, Emergency Stop or provider failure is already a no. It is not put in front of a person as though approval could make the unsafe or impossible action valid.

## Refused is not the same as waiting for you

Two outcomes look similar on a screen and are not the same thing. **Held** means Connect prepared something and needs a yes. **Refused** means the answer was already no — the channel is off, the kill switch is on, the topic is blocked, or the spend cap is reached — and no request is raised, because asking would imply the answer could be yes.

That distinction is why a blocked topic never appears as an approval. The decision was made when somebody blocked it; the refusal is that decision being kept.

## Where the reserved decisions turn up

They arrive in one queue rather than five. Needs You holds every decision, approval and operational problem for a person, ranked so the most consequential is first, and a held message can be edited before it is approved rather than only accepted or rejected as written. Rejecting is a recorded outcome too, with the reason, which is what lets a pattern of rejections become a change to the rules instead of a daily chore.

## The cost of reserving too much

Reserving everything has a price, and this manual would rather say it than imply otherwise. A workspace that asks to approve every message ends up with a queue nobody can keep up with, and a queue nobody works is indistinguishable from a system that was switched off. The setting that survives contact with a real week is the one where low-risk work proceeds and the decisions above wait — which is why they are enumerated rather than left to a general sense of caution.

## Questions

### Can I make Connect fully autonomous, including pricing?

Yes for work inside authority you have already supplied: Auto removes the human approval step, and approved catalogue prices or grounded commercial facts may be used automatically. It still refuses anything unsupported, blocked, suppressed, over budget, stopped by Emergency Stop or rejected by the provider.

### The Assistant is signed in as me. Does it have my authority?

No. Its rights are deliberately narrower than a person's — it cannot set a price and it cannot clear a do-not-contact entry — so an instruction typed into it cannot reach further than you could reach through the same screens.

### What happens to a held message I never answer?

It expires unsent, and the expiry is recorded. Nothing about the passage of time turns a held commercial or legal message into a sent one.

## Related

- [What Connect decides on its own](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/product/what-connect-decides/)
- [Approvals](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/autonomy/approvals/)
- [Needs You](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/autonomy/needs-you/)
- [Price, SLA and warranty: what Connect may say](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/sales/safe-sales/)
- [What the Assistant may not do](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/assistant/assistant-authority/)
- [Current limits](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/product/limits/)

## What this page is based on

- `backend/app/autonomy.py` — pricing, money and legal topic sets, and the timeout restriction
- PROJECT-STATE.md — the Assistant's rights stay narrower than a person's, 2026-09-10
- `webapp/trust/index.html` — data rights and requests
- AGENTS.md §8 — what is never done without asking