# Crawl-Walk-Run Automation Gating

> Roll out agent autonomy in three explicit tiers — suggest only → act on internal staff → act on external customers — with measurable gates between each.

- **Category**: Agentic AI
- **Subcategory**: Governance & Observability
- **Canonical URL**: https://designpattern.fyi/patterns/crawl_walk_run_automation_gating/

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## Description
**Intent**: Roll an agent out in three explicit autonomy tiers with measurable gates between them — Crawl (suggests only), Walk (acts on internal staff), Run (acts on external customers).
**Context**: You've built an agent that could plausibly act autonomously on customer-facing actions — replying to tickets, issuing refunds, modifying production resources. The blast radius of a bad action ranges from a confused colleague to a regulatory incident. Stakeholders want both fast deployment and confidence nothing irreversible happens before the agent is trusted.
**Solution**: Tag every agent action with an autonomy tier. Crawl emits only suggestions; humans act. Walk executes on internal staff under their approval contract. Run acts directly on external customers. Each tier publishes a metric bar (acceptance rate, internal completion, customer outcome) and a minimum duration. Promotion requires clearing the bar; regression demotes. Critically, **tier is per-action-type, not per-agent** — the same agent can be in Run on safe actions and Crawl on irreversible ones.



## Use Cases
- An agent will eventually act on external customers and the team needs an evidence-based ramp.
- Different action types have very different blast radius.
- Stakeholders need a shared vocabulary for promotion and demotion decisions.






## Trade-offs


### Advantages

- Forces a measurement program before each autonomy step — no blind promotions.

- The same agent can ship at heterogeneous trust levels per action type.

- Demotion is legible — it's a tier change, not a rollback.




### Considerations & Drawbacks

- Three tiers can be too coarse for some risk surfaces (consider an autonomy-slider variant for finer control).

- Promotion politics — stakeholders push past the gate when metrics are mixed.







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**Reference**: [Original Source](https://www.agentpatternscatalog.org/patterns/crawl-walk-run-automation-gating/)