Approval is the product.
AI has made drafting cheap. The scarce thing now is a person willing to put their name to the result, and most AI tools skip that step entirely.
For most of the history of business writing, the expensive part was the writing. A proposal took days; a technical report took weeks. Review and sign-off were the short step at the end, squeezed in before the deadline.
AI has inverted that. A competent first draft now takes minutes. What hasn’t got any faster is the moment a qualified person reads it, decides it is right and agrees to stand behind it. That moment was always what made a document worth sending. Now it is also the bottleneck, and the part most AI tools treat as somebody else’s problem.
Generated is not the same as yours
Text that a model produced is not yet the organisation’s work. It becomes the organisation’s work when someone with the authority and the knowledge to judge it says so. Until then it is a suggestion, however polished it reads.
The risk with chat-style tools is that this line disappears. The draft appears in the same window as the question, gets copied into a document, picks up the letterhead and goes out. Nobody decided it was approved. It simply never stopped being treated as finished.
Designing around the decision
Organisations that get real value from AI drafting tend to build the process around approval rather than generation.
Approve a version, not a document. Sign-off attaches to a specific version of a specific section. If the words change afterwards, it is a new version, and it needs approving again.
Show the approver the evidence. Reviewers can only judge what they can check. Every claim in front of them should link to the excerpt it came from, so review is a decision rather than an act of faith.
Make readiness visible. At any moment, it should be obvious which sections are approved, which are waiting and what stands between the document and sending it.
Anyone can generate a document now. The value is in the name at the bottom, and in being able to show why it’s there.
This is a more demanding way to work than pasting from a chat window, but it is the only way that scales. As drafting gets cheaper, the volume of text an organisation could send rises without limit; its capacity to stand behind that text does not. Treating approval as the product, and making it quick, well informed and recorded, is how you keep the speed without losing the trust. It is also what lets you answer, later, what exactly you sent.