​Your AI Agent Can Approve Its Own Payments, But Who Signs For It?

Keegan Crage is the owner of TechBrain, an ISO 27001-certified technology, cybersecurity & AI governance partner operating across Australia.

​Organizations have started automating their processes with agents but not always granting full autonomy. Agents can prepare the work, but they aren’t always trusted to finish it. In our business, sending an email, authorizing a payment or finalizing a new user’s setup still needs a person to sign off. That human in the loop is there by design.

Our clients have taken a similar approach and, in fact, none of them currently allow an agent to make payments on their behalf. Instead, all approvals are undertaken manually by individuals under the normal segregation of duties that has been in place to protect the finance function for decades.

In other words, the person who can amend a supplier’s bank account details is not the person who approves payment to that supplier.

Nearly a third of Australian organizations (32.5%) are using agentic AI, as reported in the HTI Corporate Leaders Survey in the AICD’s June 2026 director’s guide. As the functionality of these AI agents expands, organizations will need to consider an important question before go-live: Who is responsible for approving the actions taken by the AI agent?

The Second Person Is The Control​

Historically, in organizations that manually process payments and segregate duties, the person that sets up a payment is not the same person that approves it for processing. It is this second person that identifies whether a supplier’s bank account has changed or if an invoice looks suspicious.

But a human in the loop is not the same as human control. Someone who approves whatever is put in front of them is just another step in the workflow. Someone independent of the person who set up the payment, who can see the evidence and has the authority to refuse, is a control. Segregation of duties depends on the second kind.