Refunds at machine speed,
goodwill within limits
Retail teams run refund, pricing, and inventory agents through govern.sh so the easy 90% of cases resolve in seconds — and the expensive edge cases pause for a human before a dollar moves.
Where autonomy breaks down today
Refund authority is all or nothing
An agent with your Stripe key can refund $4 or $4,000 with the same call. Without runtime limits, one bad parse of an angry email becomes a five-figure mistake.
Peak season breaks manual review
The review queue that works in March collapses in November. Teams either slow refunds to a crawl or wave everything through — both cost real money.
Chargebacks arrive without evidence
When a customer disputes an automated refund or credit, support has screenshots and log lines — not proof of what the agent did, under which policy, approved by whom.
One refund, fully accounted for
A customer reports a damaged espresso machine on order #58201. refund-agent picks up the ticket and works it to a signed close.
refund-agent verifies the order
PassportActing under its own passport, the agent reads the order history and delivery confirmation. Its credential can read orders and issue refunds — nothing else in your Stripe account.
It requests a $412 refund
Policypayments-guardrail evaluates stripe.refund in 7 ms. The amount is inside the agent's $2,500 daily budget but above the $250 auto-approve line.
The refund holds for human sign-off
ApprovalInstead of executing or erroring, the action pauses. Dana on the CX team gets a Slack card with the order, the damage photos, and the agent's reasoning.
Dana approves in Slack
BudgetOne tap. The refund executes against Stripe, the customer gets their money, and the daily refund budget decrements by $412.
The receipt closes the loop
ReceiptA signed receipt — agent, amount, policy verdict, approver — is chained into the audit trail and attached to the ticket. If this refund is ever disputed, the proof is one link away.
Autonomy tuned to your margins
Set the auto-approve line where your unit economics say it belongs, and move it seasonally without redeploying a single agent.
One line — require_approval: amount > $250 — separates instant resolution from human review. Change the number, not the agent.
Refund and credit agents carry hard daily caps. Runaway loops and prompt injection stop at the budget line, not at your month-end close.
Every refund, credit, and price change links a signed receipt to the order record — your chargeback response writes itself.
Policy decisions run in single-digit milliseconds, so Black Friday volume changes nothing about how carefully each action is checked.
Representative outcomes reported by govern.sh customers in e-commerce.
Cardholder-safe by construction
Agents act through scoped credentials that never expose full payment instrument data, and every action against the payment stack lands in a tamper-evident log — supporting PCI DSS Requirements 7 and 10 on least-privilege access and traceability. Your QSA gets a receipt chain, not a log export to interpret.
We set the auto-approve line at $250 and let refund-agent run through Cyber Week. It closed eleven thousand tickets, and the forty-one that paused for approval were exactly the ones I would have wanted to see.
Related use cases
Put a verified agent to work in e-commerce.
Mint a passport, attach a policy, and watch the first signed receipt land — free for your first three agents.