What is Human-in-the-Loop Automation?

Automation is integral to effective IT operations, but some processes still require human decision-making. Human-in-the-loop (HITL) automation combines structured automation with human approvals to support flexibility, governance, and security in critical workflows.

What is HITL Automation?

Human-in-the-loop (HITL) automation is a hybrid approach where automated workflows pause for an end-user to accept or reject an activity before continuing execution. Unlike fully autonomous processes, HITL ensures that business-critical and compliance-sensitive actions get human oversight before they are finalized.

HITL is widely used in IT Ops, CloudOps, DevOps, and business workflows, including:

• IT Service Requests: Approving access control, software installations, and firewall rule changes.
• Cloud and Infrastructure Provisioning: Managing auto-scaling, virtual machine (VM) approvals, and storage allocation.
• DevOps and CI/CD Pipelines: Requiring human validation for deployment approvals and security reviews.
• Finance and Procurement: Streamlining budget approvals, invoice processing, and financial authorizations.
• HR and Employee Onboarding: Handling account creation, training access, and role-based provisioning.

By embedding HITL tasks into your service orchestration and automation platform (SOAP) workflows, you ensure your processes remain efficient, compliant, and adaptable to real-world business needs.

The Convergence of BPA and WLA within SOAP

Historically, workload automation (WLA) focused on automating IT infrastructure and applications, handling automated system tasks like job scheduling and batch processing, as well as data pipeline orchestration. These solutions were designed for IT teams, ensuring that critical system processes ran efficiently and on schedule.

In contrast, business process automation (BPA) tools have traditionally handled manual approvals, supporting finance, HR, procurement, and customer service workflows. BPA platforms enable structured human approvals for activities such as budget sign-offs, employee onboarding, and invoice processing, ensuring that manual interventions are built into business process workflows.

However, BPA and WLA tools were often isolated, leading to fragmented approval processes where IT-driven workflows and business-driven approvals remain disconnected. 

This is where service orchestration and automation platforms (SOAPs) bridge the gap. Unlike traditional WLA or BPA solutions, SOAPs are designed to:

• Unify WLA and BPA capabilities by orchestrating both IT automation tasks and business process approvals in a single, centralized platform.
• Integrate seamlessly with ITSM tools (e.g., ServiceNow, Jira), communication platforms (e.g., Slack, Microsoft Teams), and enterprise applications (e.g., SAP, Salesforce, Workday) to streamline HITL approvals across departments.
• Support real-time, event-driven automation, ensuring that approvals trigger immediately when needed, rather than following static workflows.

Organizations are rapidly adopting SOAPs to streamline human process approvals. According to the 2025 Global State of IT Automation report, 59% of enterprises already automate human approvals using a SOAP, and another 35% plan to start within the next year. When leveraging a SOAP as the process orchestrator, these businesses typically:

• Automate approval routing: Ensure requests go to the right person based on predefined rules.
• Enable instant notifications: Send requests to the tools that approvers use most for quicker response times.
• Maintain an audit trail: Track every action to improve governance and compliance.

By combining the structured rules-based automation of WLA with the flexible, user-driven workflows of BPA, SOAPs create a single automation layer that spans the enterprise. This eliminates silos, ensures faster and more reliable approvals, and empowers enterprises to scale automation across departments without disrupting existing workflows.

Summary

With 94% of organizations currently implementing or expected to implement HITL automation in the next year, it is becoming a business-critical capability. The emerging popularity of enterprise-wide process automation means that it’s no longer just an IT function — all functional teams throughout the business are now integral to IT automation strategies and the human approvals that accompany them.

By integrating HITL workflows into SOAP, ITSM, and messenger/communication platforms, organizations gain the best of both worlds: automation efficiency with human oversight where it matters most.

Want to learn more? See how Stonebranch Universal Automation Center (UAC) supports self-service and HITL automation throughout the organization.