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Reference

Work item statuses

A work item carries a single status describing where it is in its lifecycle. This page defines the eight item statuses, what each means, their known transitions, and where you see them. These are distinct from workflow run statuses — an item status describes a unit of work, not a flow execution.

The status values come from the released API contract (ItemStatus) and appear in the Items list in the platform. See Items for the API and Item status reporting for the UI.

The eight item statuses

Status (ItemStatus)	UI label	Terminal?	Meaning
QUEUED	Queued	No	Accepted and waiting to start processing.
IN_PROGRESS	In Progress	No	Being processed by a flow's nodes.
DEFERRED	Deferred	No	Set aside to be picked up later.
REVIEW	Review	No	Paused and waiting for a person, having been sent to human review.
COMPLETE	Complete	Yes	Finished its flow successfully and reached the terminal state.
CLOSED	Closed	Yes	Ended without continuing through the normal completion path.
FAILED	Failed	Yes	Stopped on an error before completing.
CANCELED	Canceled	Yes	Canceled and no longer being processed.

In the UI these appear in plain title case (for example, In Progress, Review). Note the spelling: the item status is CANCELED (single "L"), distinct from the run status CANCELLED (double "L") in Workflow run statuses.

Known transitions

An item generally moves forward through processing, with review as a pause-and-resume:

Code
QUEUED ──▶ IN_PROGRESS ──▶ REVIEW ──▶ IN_PROGRESS ──▶ COMPLETE
              │                                  └────▶ FAILED
              └──▶ DEFERRED ──▶ IN_PROGRESS

• An item is created in QUEUED, then IN_PROGRESS as the flow processes it.
• A Flag for Human Review node routes the item to REVIEW. Submitting the review returns the item to the flow, which resumes processing.
• Marking an item complete (the Mark Item as Complete action) sets it to the terminal COMPLETE status.
• An item that errors becomes FAILED. Items can also end as CLOSED (off the normal completion path) or CANCELED.
• DEFERRED is a non-terminal hold: an item set aside that can be picked up again later.

Terminal statuses (COMPLETE, CLOSED, FAILED, CANCELED) are fixed once reached; the others are non-terminal.

Where you can see item statuses

• Items list — each item shows a Status badge, and you can filter the list by one or more statuses. See Human review.
• Status cards — a count summary above the list. See below, and Item status reporting reference.
• API — the status field on ItemResponse, and the status filter on GET /items (which accepts one or more values, e.g. status=REVIEW&status=FAILED). See Items.

How items relate to the four reporting cards

Do not confuse the eight item statuses with the status cards shown above the Items list. The cards are a data-driven count summary, not a separate or reduced status set:

• The cards lead with the four most common lifecycle states — In Progress, Review, Complete, Failed — which carry distinct badge colors.
• But a card is shown for each status that currently has at least one item, so Queued, Deferred, and Closed cards can also appear. Canceled items are never shown as a card.
• The cards are counts only — point-in-time totals for the current AI Agent and filters, with no trends, throughput, or straight-through rates.

The full eight-status set is exposed through the API; the cards summarize counts of those same statuses. There is no 1:1 "four statuses" model — the four are simply the most frequently seen cards. See Item status reporting reference.

Where to go next

• Items — the API resource, where status is returned and filtered.
• Item status reporting reference — the reporting cards and what they summarize.
• Human review — work items in the REVIEW status.
• Workflow run statuses — the separate five-status vocabulary for runs.