Approval gate (dry run)
An approval gate is a control in an AI or automation system that pauses a proposed change, shows exactly what would happen as a dry run, and executes it only after a human explicitly confirms.
When an assistant only reads data, a mistake costs you a wrong sentence. The moment it can write — pause a campaign, move a budget, delete an audience — mistakes cost money the same day. An approval gate is the human-in-the-loop checkpoint that sits between intent and execution. It has two halves: the dry run, which computes and displays the exact change without committing it, and the confirmation, which is an explicit action by the person.
The quality of a dry run is what makes the gate useful. "I'll update your budget" is not a preview. "Campaign 'Brand — Search' (ID 12345678), daily budget 400 → 600, +50%, effective immediately" is. A good preview names the account and the object, shows the current value next to the proposed value, states the direction and magnitude of the change, and flags anything irreversible. Anything vaguer trains people to click approve without reading, which is worse than no gate at all.
Gates work best alongside a few companions: change limits that cap how far a single edit can move a budget or bid, account scoping so tools can only touch the accounts you selected, an audit log of who approved what and when, and reversibility wherever the platform allows it. One distinction matters technically — a client-side "always allow this tool" setting can skip the confirmation prompt, so a gate enforced on the server is stronger: the server simply refuses to act until it receives an explicit confirm.
In Opus Growth every write action passes an approval gate. Creating or pausing a campaign, changing budgets and bids, adding keywords or negatives, building audiences, uploading creatives — each returns first as a dry run showing the exact change, and only applies once you approve it. Behind that sit per-customer isolation, MCC/agency-safe account scoping, and audit logging of what was applied.
Frequently asked questions
The dry run is the preview itself — what would change, on which object, from which value to which value. The approval gate is the rule that nothing executes until a person approves that preview. In practice they are two halves of the same flow.
A confirmation takes seconds; a budget typed one zero wrong costs a day of spend. Reads and reports run instantly — only writes are gated, so the friction lands exactly where the risk is.
It depends on the tool, and you should prefer ones where it cannot be silently skipped. In Opus Growth the gate is enforced server-side: you can review and approve changes in batches, but the checkpoint itself stays in place.
