AI Draft Approval Workflow: Which Sales Emails a Human Must Check

BOTrento Team5 November 20267 min read

Why "approve everything equally" fails

Owners who are wary of automation often start with one rule: every draft must be approved by me. It feels safe, and for a week it is. Then the drafts pile up, the owner becomes the bottleneck, and replies get slower than before. The team starts clicking through without reading, which is worse than no policy at all.

The opposite rule, let the routine ones go automatically, is just as weak. The email that looks routine is sometimes the one where a customer has quietly changed the scope.

A better approach is to decide in advance how much attention each type of email deserves. Approval is then fast where risk is low and careful where it matters.

The three-tier approval policy

Sort every draft by what it could cost you if it were wrong. Three tiers are enough for a team of 3–30 people.

Tier 1: quick check by the enquiry owner

Low risk, easy to correct, no commitment. The person handling the enquiry reads the draft, fixes anything odd and approves it. Typical examples:

• Acknowledging an enquiry and saying when the customer will hear back
• Asking for missing information (dates, venue, quantities, delivery address)
• Polite follow-up nudges on a quote already sent
• Thanking someone after a call and summarising what was agreed

Tier 2: owner or senior sign-off

Anything that puts a price, a date or a promise in writing. A second pair of eyes is worth the extra minutes. Typical examples:

• Quotes and revised quotes, including any discount
• Replies mentioning availability, delivery dates or capacity
• Changes to scope, payment terms or cancellation terms
• First reply to a large or strategic customer
• Anything that quotes a previous price or a past agreement

Tier 3: a draft must never decide this alone

Here AI may prepare notes or a starting point, but a person writes or substantially rewrites the message, usually after a call:

• Complaints, disputes and anything involving a refund or liability
• Contract wording, NDAs and legal or regulatory questions
• Confirming a booking, a reservation or a binding date
• Negotiation of price against a competitor
• Sensitive personal data or anything the customer marked confidential

For a deeper look at which tasks suit AI and which stay human, see which tasks to hand over to an AI assistant first.

A five-point checklist for the person approving

Whatever the tier, the reviewer should answer the same five questions before pressing send. Print them or pin them next to the screen.

1. Is it the right customer and the right enquiry? Check the name, company and the thread it replies to.
2. Are the facts correct? Prices, quantities, dates, product names and units against your price list or the original enquiry.
3. Does it promise anything we have not agreed? Availability, discounts, deadlines, "we will definitely".
4. Did it miss anything in the enquiry? Questions the customer asked that the draft ignores. Remember that a draft is built from the email text, so details that only appear in an attachment may be missing.
5. Does it sound like us? Tone, language and level of formality for this particular customer.

If any answer is no, edit the draft or move it up a tier. That is the whole process.

A policy template you can copy

Put this on one page and share it with everyone who touches enquiries. Adjust the examples to your business.

AI draft approval policy

1. No AI draft is sent without a named person approving it.

2. Tier 1 (acknowledgements, information requests, follow-up nudges): the enquiry owner approves after reading the full draft.

3. Tier 2 (anything with a price, date, availability, discount or changed terms): the owner or [name/role] approves.

4. Tier 3 (complaints, contracts, bookings, legal questions, negotiation): a person writes the message; AI may only supply a summary or notes.

5. If unsure, treat the email as the next tier up.

6. Each week, [name] reviews a handful of approved drafts and edits to see whether the tiers still fit.

The last point matters. Look at what your team changes most often in drafts: that tells you where the tiers or your source material need work. If you rely on templates for the repeatable cases, this comparison of email templates and AI drafts helps you decide where each belongs.

Make approval fast enough to actually use

A policy only holds if approving is quick. Three habits help:

• One place for drafts. If approvals live in a shared inbox, a chat thread and someone's notes, they will be missed. Keep a single queue.
• Named approvers and a cover rule. Decide who approves Tier 2 when the owner is travelling or on holiday.
• Check follow-ups daily. Quote chasing is the work most often forgotten; our short guide on how to stop forgetting quote follow-ups covers the basics.

Before you switch anything on, it also helps to run through the AI assistant readiness checklist, which covers mailbox access, written prices and approval rules.

How BOTrento handles approval

BOTrento Chief of Staff is built around this policy rather than against it. It watches your enquiries and quotes in the mailbox and in the data you upload, and prepares draft replies, quotes and follow-ups in four languages (Czech, English, German and French). It never sends anything itself. Every email and quote draft is approved by a person first.

It also catches promises such as "I will get back to you by Friday" and reminds you, and each working morning it shows a short Today overview so the team knows which drafts to look at first. It does not confirm dates or bookings, and it does not replace your CRM or accounting software, so Pipedrive, HubSpot or your spreadsheet stay where they are. You can see how the flow works in the process demo.

Gmail, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 mailboxes are connected for now by forwarding or import; other mailboxes, including Seznam, connect via IMAP. AI is included in the plan with a monthly usage limit, and you are warned at 80%. You can compare the plans on the pricing page. Details of how data is handled are in our GDPR checklist for AI sales tools; if you have a specific legal question, talk to your lawyer.

The 14-day free trial needs no payment card and no API key of your own. It starts when you first upload data, so you can test your approval tiers on real enquiries. For a day-by-day way to judge it, see the 14-day trial plan.