Refunds under an approval limit

GembaOS is a zero-trust governance runtime for enterprise AI agents: policy-decided access, single-use clearance tokens bound to exact parameters, and accountable human approvals, running on-premises or in a private VPC. This scenario is the refunds and claims case: a customer message is never authority to move money, and the approval limit your company already has decides who signs.

How can an agent issue refunds without a customer message becoming authority?

GembaOS treats the customer’s message as data and lets the policy decide the route from the verified facts: the order, the amount, the Delegation of Authority. A refund within the delegated limit passes on the agent stamps; a higher amount becomes an approval request for the finance owner; the payment adapter is called once, under a clearance token bound to that amount and that order.

	Before	With GembaOS
Who decides	A support agent with a refund button, or a chatbot that promises	The policy, from the amount and the authority table
Evidence	Whatever the chat log says	Machine-verified facts: the order exists, the amount is what the order allows
Above the limit	An email to finance, answered whenever	An approval request with the facts, the amount and the reasons, signed with a passkey
The customer’s answer	Written by the agent, sometimes wrong	An official answer from approved facts, separate from the internal trail

What happens, step by step?

Step	Who	What is recorded
1. Request	The customer writes; the front desk agent opens a work item	The conversation, rebuilt from the work item’s own record
2. Verify	The host reads the order under field-level rules	The facts the approvers will see
3. Route	The policy compares the amount with the DOA	The route: agent stamps only, or a person
4. Sign	The finance owner, with a passkey, when the route requires it	The signature chain with reasons
5. Execute	The payment adapter, once, under the clearance	The execution and the clearance it consumed
6. Answer	The host writes the official answer	The answer, cited to approved knowledge

Where is the control point?

The control point is the amount check against the authority table, and the human signature above the limit. The agent cannot raise the limit, cannot change the amount after the signature (a different amount does not match the clearance), and cannot call the payment system twice. The customer sees only the official answer; the internal approval record stays on the work item.

What does it look like in the console?

GembaOS approval desk showing a sample refund request awaiting the human supervisor

GembaOS approval desk after the human signature, archived with four signatures

GembaOS audit view replaying the decision records for the sample refund

What do we need to start?

The refund or claims authority table as it is today: who may approve up to which amount.
Read access to orders or policies for the facts, through the REST or SQL adapter.
One payment or credit-note adapter for execution, its credential held at the gateway.
The customer channel: email, a web widget, a chat platform or the phone line.

Related: keep your CRM, security and deployment, the FAQ.