Abstract

Agentic Process Automation (APA) extends Robotic Process Automation by delegating workflow construction and runtime decisions to Large Language Model (LLM) agents. In regulated business processes, this autonomy creates a specific safety risk: an LLM may recognize elevated risk while still failing to trigger the human approval required by policy. We propose Governed APA, a runtime decision architecture that bounds LLM autonomy through schema-validated inputs, a closed action space, a policy-derived floor guardrail, and a deterministic fallback. We formalize the governed decision and establish a floor-safety property ensuring that the executed action cannot under-escalate below the policy-mandated minimum. The architecture is evaluated on a structured employee-onboarding case study with 166 profiles and explicit human-in-the-loop (HITL) ground truth. We compare a deterministic baseline, an ungoverned LLM, and a guarded LLM using two local models, Qwen2.5 and llama3.1. Ungoverned Qwen2.5 identified elevated risk but failed to escalate any of the 43 sensitive cases to mandatory human approval, yielding HITL recall equal to 0. Ungoverned llama3.1 showed the opposite failure mode, achieving full recall but producing unnecessary human-approval escalations. With the floor guardrail active, Qwen2.5 HITL recall increased to 1.0, llama3.1 recall remained 1.0, and inter-run stability of the compliance decision increased from 0.73 to 1.0 for Qwen2.5. On this dataset and configuration, no false-positive HITL escalation was introduced for Qwen2.5. These results show that compliance-critical APA requires architectural governance rather than prompt-level reliance on LLM discretion. The policy-derived floor guardrail enforces the floor-safety property and prevents silent under-escalation. The guarantee is local: it constrains the compliance routing decision under validated inputs and a trusted policy, and does not cover input corruption, policy errors, extraction failures, prompt injection, downstream tool misuse, or end-to-end workflow correctness. The evaluation is a single-process, two-model proof of concept, and generalization to other regulated workflows is a hypothesis for future validation.

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