Human-on-the-Loop Runbook: Escalation Tiers When Agents Act

Escalation tiers T0–T3 for agentic workflows: when agents may read, draft, or act—and the runbooks, kill switches, and on-call patterns that keep autonomy bounded.

Executive Summary

By mapping all write-actions to four distinct tiers with hard spend caps, mean time to detect bad autonomy dropped from six hours to under 45 minutes. The critical shift was tying tier violations directly to an on-call P&L owner's pager, not a generic engineering queue, forcing accountability at the point of action.

"An un-tiered support…