What is review before send?
An AI agent writes the message, and a person approves it before anything leaves your company. Here is how each CRM handles it.
The short answer
- Review before send is a setting where an AI agent drafts an email or message and holds it until a person approves it. Nothing reaches your prospect without a human yes.
- HubSpot's prospecting agent offers review before sending as one of two modes, next to send automatically, according to HubSpot's knowledge base in September 2026.
- Salesforce Agentforce uses the words suggestive mode and autonomous mode: in suggestive mode a person reviews, edits and approves the updates the agent proposes.
- SalesCrew gives every agent four modes (off, draft, review and auto), and its default policy table sends every external message to review.
Why a review step beats a trust setting
An AI agent that writes sales email makes two kinds of mistakes. Some are small, like an odd phrase. Others cost you a relationship, like a wrong name, a price you never quoted or a follow-up to someone who asked you to stop. You can't tell in advance which kind the next draft holds.
A review step puts a person between the draft and the send. You read it, approve it or reject it, and only then does it leave. It's slower than auto, and that's the point: every message you approve becomes evidence of how good the agent is.
Your approval record is what lets you relax the rule later. Once you've approved a long run of drafts without edits, moving one type of message to auto is a decision based on data, not hope.
How three CRMs name the review step
Read on each vendor's own documentation.
| CRM | What the review step is called | Other modes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| HubSpot (prospecting agent) | Review before sending: you approve each message before it goes out | Send automatically, based on your outreach settings | knowledge.hubspot.com |
| Salesforce (Agentforce Sales) | Suggestive mode: review, edit and approve the updates the agent proposes | Autonomous mode, which updates opportunities automatically | salesforce.com/sales/ai-sales-agent |
| SalesCrew (our product) | Review: the agent's work waits in one approval queue until a person approves or rejects it | Off, draft and auto, set per agent, with a kill switch that stops every agent | Disclosure: SalesCrew is our product. |
Vendor facts checked on vendor documentation pages, September 2026.
How SalesCrew runs review before send
In SalesCrew, you set each agent to one of four modes. Off does nothing. Draft writes the artefact and stops. Review puts it in the approval queue for a person. Auto runs it and logs it, and drops back to review when the agent's confidence falls below your threshold.
A policy table decides the default for each type of action. Research, tagging, scoring and summaries run on auto. Every external send, whether it's an email, a LinkedIn message or a marketplace proposal, goes to review. Any spend stays human-only.
Guardrails sit on top of the modes. SalesCrew keeps at least three days between touches to one contact. It caps sends per mailbox and per domain each day, and re-checks suppression at the moment of sending. The same approval queue is reachable from the app and through MCP tools, so you can approve from Claude or ChatGPT as well.
A review queue nobody reads is auto with a delay
Questions
- Is review before send the same as draft mode?
- No. In draft mode the agent writes the message and stops, so you have to find it and send it yourself. In review mode the message goes into a queue with a clear approve or reject step, and approving it sends it. SalesCrew offers both as separate agent modes, next to off and auto.
- Does HubSpot's prospecting agent have review before send?
- Yes. HubSpot's knowledge base describes two modes for the prospecting agent: review before sending, where you approve each message, and send automatically, where the agent sends based on your outreach settings. You pick the mode in the Automation tab when you create a play. HubSpot also notes that personalised outreach uses HubSpot Credits.
- Which messages should always go through review?
- Anything that leaves your company: emails, LinkedIn messages, texts and marketplace proposals. In SalesCrew's default policy table every external send is set to review, while low-risk internal work like tagging, logging and scoring runs on auto. Spend of any kind, such as credits, connects or ads, stays human-only.
- When is it safe to switch an agent from review to auto?
- Switch when you have a record of the agent's drafts and your approval rate on them is high enough that you'd stop reading. SalesCrew's default table uses one clean week as the bar for booking meetings and creating deals from positive replies. Even on auto, SalesCrew falls back to review when the agent's confidence is below the threshold you set.