What to hand an AI agent first

Most first attempts at handing work to an agent go wrong in the same way. Somebody picks the biggest annoyance in the business, which is usually the messiest thing in the business, and the agent inherits the mess.

Start somewhere smaller and duller. The dull jobs are where the hours actually are.

The test

A job suits an agent if you can answer three questions without arguing with a colleague:

What triggers it? A day of the week, a threshold being crossed, something arriving. If the honest answer is "when someone remembers", that is a good sign — that is exactly the work worth moving — but you need to be able to say what should trigger it.

Where does the information live? A system, a spreadsheet, an inbox. If it lives in someone's head, that has to come out first, and that is a conversation rather than a configuration.

What does "done" look like? A drafted email, a filled-in row, a message to a person, a report in an inbox. If nobody can describe the finished state, the agent cannot reach it.

Three clear answers means it is ready. A vague answer to any of them is not a reason to give up — it is the bit to sort out first, and it usually takes a conversation rather than a project.

Good first jobs

Chasing things that are late. Invoices, timesheets, documents, approvals. The rules are usually clear, the work is disliked, and it is done badly precisely because everyone hates it. We have written up the invoice version.

The regular report nobody enjoys building. The Monday numbers, the weekly summary, the month-end pack. Somebody currently exports three things and pastes them together.

Checking one thing against another. Did every completed job get invoiced. Does the rota cover every site. Did every new customer get the welcome pack. These are quiet jobs that only get noticed when they have been going wrong for a while — and they are worth catching early.

Drafting the repetitive email. Not sending it. Drafting it, so a person presses send in five seconds instead of writing it in five minutes.

Jobs to leave until later

Anything where being wrong is expensive and invisible. Pricing, credit decisions, anything client-facing that goes out unreviewed. Not because it cannot be done, but because you want a few months of watching the agent work first.

Anything nobody agrees on. If two people describe the process differently, automating it picks a winner without a meeting. Have the meeting.

Anything that changes every week for real reasons. Some work is genuinely bespoke every time. That is a person's job and should stay one.

What the first month actually looks like

The first fortnight is mostly explaining and correcting. The agent does the job, gets some of it wrong, you say what wrong looks like, and it stops doing that. This is normal and it is the part people are least warned about.

By week three or four the corrections tail off and the job runs. That is the point at which most people hand it a second job, and the second one goes faster because the agent already knows the business.

If you want to work out what your first job should be, tell us what your week looks like — the answer is usually obvious from the outside and invisible from the inside.