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When you’re chatting with Swan directly, some actions pause and wait for you to confirm before Swan carries them out. This keeps anything destructive, or anything that fans out into a lot of work, in your hands.

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What asks for confirmation

By default, Swan asks before it:
  • Deletes or archives something. Deleting a company, a sequence, or a skill inside Swan, or archiving a record (company, contact, deal, or task) in a connected CRM like HubSpot, all require your confirmation first. This is irreversible, so Swan won’t do it silently.
  • Removes something from a third-party tool. Deleting a lead, account, opportunity, or note in Salesforce, deleting a record in Attio, deleting a sequence or lead in outreach tools like Instantly, or removing a contact from a sequence in Reply.io or Lemlist all ask first. Everyday creates and updates in those same tools (adding a contact, updating a field) do not require confirmation by default — only the delete/remove actions do.
  • Delegates work across multiple entities. When Swan hands off a task to run independently for several companies or contacts (for example, “research each of these 40 accounts”), it asks you to confirm before dispatching. If it’s delegating to two or more entities at once, it also shows you an estimate that this will trigger multiple independent runs and may consume significant credits, so you can decide whether to go ahead or narrow it down. Once you approve, a table of the individual sub-agent runs appears inline in that same chat conversation so you can track each one’s progress.
Everyday actions — searching, reading data, drafting a message, updating your own org’s records inside Swan — don’t require confirmation.

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Changing what requires confirmation

An admin can override the default for most individual tools from the tool’s entry in Tools — open the toolkit’s capabilities list and set a specific tool to always ask for confirmation, or to never ask, regardless of the built-in default. The same list can disable a tool entirely or restrict it to Admins. This applies per organization, not per user.

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Deciding in the app or in Slack

If a run is happening in a chat conversation and needs your confirmation, you can approve or reject it either from the chat itself (the confirmation appears inline in the conversation at agent.getswan.com/chat) or, if the conversation is happening in a Slack thread, from the Approve/Reject buttons there. Whichever channel you decide in first is the one that counts — once a decision has been recorded, the other channel’s buttons no longer apply to that action. Rejecting an action doesn’t stop the run. Swan treats the rejection as new information: it asks you why, or proposes a different way to accomplish the same goal, and keeps going from there.

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Trigger and background runs never pause

Runs that happen automatically — a trigger firing on a schedule, a webhook, or another background event — never stop and wait for a person the way a chat conversation does. If Swan hits an action that would normally require confirmation, it skips that specific action instead of executing it, and asks a human to approve or handle it separately (a Slack message or a task on your Desk), then continues the rest of its work. The action itself is never carried out without a human eventually approving it — the run just doesn’t sit there paused. See how triggers work and AI behavior and guardrails for more on this distinction.

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Common questions

Why is my chat input locked or read-only? This usually means there’s a pending confirmation waiting on an action, or Swan has delegated work to sub-agents that are still running in the background. Resolve the pending approval, wait for the sub-agents to finish, or press Stop (the send button in the chat input turns into Stop while a run is in progress) — stopping cancels the run and any sub-agents it dispatched, and the input unlocks. If I approve in Slack, does the app update too? Yes — approvals and rejections are recorded against the run itself, not the channel you used, so the other surface reflects the same decision. Can I require approval for every single tool Swan uses? An admin can set individual tools to always require confirmation, but there’s no single switch that makes every action in every toolkit require approval. Does rejecting an action cancel the whole task Swan was doing? No. Swan asks what you’d like it to do differently and continues working from there — it doesn’t abandon the run. Why didn’t Swan ask me before updating a HubSpot contact? Routine creates and updates to CRM records don’t require confirmation by default — only deleting/archiving records and similar destructive actions do, unless an admin has changed that tool’s setting.