Records, queue and approvals

Two things make AINOW safe to point at a live system of record: your people work their real records inside Zoe rather than switching tools, and nothing Zoe changes in a connected system happens without a person approving it first. The queue and the approvals that govern it live in Zoe at zoe.ainowsolutions.ca; the portal is where you set the policy around them and where you read back what happened.

The work queue

In Zoe, a member with a fulfiller role gets My queue — the records assigned to them, pulled live from your connected system. Records of several types are merged into one list and sorted by priority, with a filter to narrow to a single record type. When the queue is empty it says so plainly: records assigned to you appear there.

Selecting a record opens its detail pane, showing fields such as Status, State, Priority, Assigned to, Updated and Description, along with any custom fields and service-level timers. Fields can be edited in place; the pane counts unsaved changes and offers Save or Discard. If the source system refuses the change — because the record is closed or read-only, for example — the pane says so rather than pretending the edit landed. Open in ServiceNow jumps to the record in its own system when you need the full native view.

Alongside the record sits a conversation with Zoe scoped to that record, so a person can ask her to summarize the ticket, draft a resolution, or update and close it without leaving the queue. Which record types appear depends on which systems you have connected — see Integrations.

What needs approval, and why

Reading is free; changing is not. Any write Zoe wants to make to a connected system — creating an incident, updating a record, sending an email, ordering from a catalog — is drafted rather than executed. The draft appears as an approval card marked Approval required, showing the action and the proposed change, with the current value and what it would become.

This is deliberate and it is universal: the same rule applies in chat, in voice, and in scheduled automations. Zoe plans, a person decides. Custom integrations are held to the same standard — every non-read tool you define produces an approval card automatically, so a custom integration cannot be used to slip past the rule.

Approving or declining

1. Read the card's summary and the proposed change.
2. Select Approve to let it run, or Reject to stop it.
3. When rejecting from a queue record, add a Reason for rejection so the decision is legible later.

Approval cards do not wait forever. Each one shows when it expires and is good for 24 hours; after that it lapses and Zoe would have to draft the action again. If two people act on the same card at once, only the first decision counts.

What happens next

After you approve, the card moves through Executing… and then settles on one of a few outcomes:

• Completed — the change was made in the connected system.
• Failed — nothing was changed — the system refused the action and nothing was applied.
• Rejected — you declined it and nothing was applied.
• Expired — the approval window elapsed before anyone decided.

The distinction between Failed and the others matters: a failure means the attempt was made and refused, so the record is unchanged, but the reason is worth reading — it is usually a permission or state problem in the source system.

Approving by voice

Spoken approvals are configurable, because a phone call is a different risk surface from a screen. On the Settings page, the Voice card offers three policies: Always tap to approve, Approve low-risk changes by voice, or Approve any change by voice. The strictest option is the default posture, and some actions — a customer-facing email reply, for example — always require a tap regardless of the setting. When a spoken approval creates a record, Zoe reads its reference number back to the caller.

Approvals inside the portal

The portal has one approval queue of its own: Promotion requests on the Skills page, where you approve or reject a member's request to promote a personal skill to an organization-wide one.

The audit trail

Every step of this is recorded: the draft, who decided it and how, and whether execution succeeded or failed. You can read it back per conversation on the Audit page in the portal, or per reply through the Explain view in Zoe. Both are covered in Guardrails and governance.