Every Wardlow rollout has a week or two where nothing seems to happen. The agent is connected, the guardrails are set, and yet every action still waits for a person. That’s shadow mode, and it’s the part of a rollout we would never skip.

How it works

In shadow mode, the agent does all of its work except the final step. It reads the ticket, checks the order and drafts the reply, but the reply goes to a person, who approves it, edits it or rejects it. Nothing reaches a customer or a system without that decision.

Every decision is recorded. At the end of each day, the team gets a report by case type: how many drafts were approved as they were, how many were edited, and how many were rejected, with the reasons.

What we learn from it

Three things, usually.

• Where the agent is ready. Some case types reach 95% approval without edits within days. Those go live first.

• Where your process isn’t written down. Many edits aren’t the agent’s mistakes. They’re rules that lived in someone’s head: “we always waive the fee for customers over five years.” Shadow mode surfaces them, and your lead decides whether they become a policy.

• Where a limit is wrong. If the team approves every handed-off refund between $500 and $750, the limit is probably too tight.

At Saltmarsh Logistics, the team approved 93% of Tessa’s invoice matches without edits during shadow mode. The 7% they changed taught us two rules about fuel surcharges that weren’t written anywhere.

Edits don’t change the agent on their own

An important detail: the agent doesn’t learn directly from your team’s edits. Edits are reviewed by your lead, and only the ones they approve become part of the agent’s instructions. Every change is versioned in the Run Log. We don’t want an agent picking up one person’s shortcut and applying it to ten thousand cases.

When it ends

Shadow mode ends when your team says so, case type by case type, usually around day 18. Typically the routine cases go live first and the rest stay in shadow mode a little longer.

And it’s never really over. Any agent can be switched back to drafting at any time, for a whole team, one topic or one customer. Teams use it before a peak season, after a policy change, or when someone new takes over approvals.

Why it’s worth the week

Customers sometimes ask if we can skip it. We can’t, and the teams who were most impatient at the start usually tell us why afterwards: shadow mode is when their people stop worrying about the agent and start shaping it.