Start with a job people recognise
A good starting point is something your team can describe without mentioning AI. Preparing the information for a quotation. Checking whether a service request contains everything needed to act. Bringing together the open questions before a project meeting. These are recognisable pieces of work with a person waiting for the result.
Ask the people doing that work where they spend time searching, copying, checking and chasing. Look for a recurring job with a useful outcome, available information and an owner who wants to improve it. A modest workflow that frees someone to serve customers is a stronger starting point than a grand organisation chart nobody knows how to operate.
Frequency matters, but so does friction. A task repeated every day may already run smoothly. A weekly task that interrupts four people might offer more value. Follow the work from its trigger to the moment the next person can actually use the result.
Write down what finished means
Consider quotation preparation as an illustration. A customer sends a request, an attachment and several details in a separate email. A colleague has to collect those pieces, find the relevant product information and decide what is missing before preparing an offer.
The first agent workflow could assemble that material into a short preparation pack. It would link back to the request, use approved product information and flag unanswered questions. The commercial owner would then check the pack and decide the offer, price and commitments. That is a concrete scope to design and test together.
Finished means that the named colleague can take the next step. It does not simply mean that a document exists. Agree what must be present, how missing information should appear and where the result belongs. If an important source is unavailable, the result should clearly ask for help instead of filling the gap with a confident guess.
Give a person ownership and room to learn
Someone needs to own the quality of the outcome and help improve the workflow. Choose a person who understands the job and its effect on the next colleague. Give them time to explain the exceptions, review early outputs and suggest changes. Their knowledge is part of the design.
This is also a management and HR conversation. Which parts of the role become less repetitive? Which decisions remain with the employee? What new skills will they need to direct the agent and recognise a poor result? A wider role needs support, clear expectations and authority to act.
An agent should help create capacity the organisation can use. Decide what that capacity is for: faster responses, more attention to existing customers or time to develop new business. Otherwise, the team can become faster at preparation without changing the customer experience.
Make the boundaries easy to understand
For the quotation example, a useful first boundary is straightforward: the agent prepares; the commercial owner decides what is offered. Access should cover the information needed for that preparation. Sending messages, changing prices or accepting commitments are separate decisions with their own permissions.
Governance becomes useful when those boundaries exist in the working system. People should be able to see what happened, correct an instruction and stop work that is going in the wrong direction. There should be a clear route for questions, conflicting information and unexpected cases.
The shared information needs ownership too. An approved template or product document is only useful if someone maintains it. Decide which source is current and who may change it. That is part of building a dependable organisation around agents.
Measure the work your colleague no longer has to do
Before building, look at a small set of recent examples. How much time did preparation take? How long did the request wait? What information was missing? How much correction was needed? Use those observations as the starting point for comparison.
When testing the agent workflow, count the human effort as well. Reading, checking, correcting and supervising all take time. Compare the whole journey to a usable result. A quick draft that requires extensive repair has not yet created the capacity you wanted.
Review ordinary cases and awkward ones. Start with approved examples in a controlled setting, improve the weak points and agree when the workflow is ready for wider use. Expand because the work is useful and dependable, with evidence the team understands.
Build the next step around what you learn
My role combines the organisational choices with hands-on building. I help choose the first useful outcome, define how people and agents work together, and develop the agent workflow with the team. Strategy, coaching and governance belong in that work from the start.
The ambition is more room to grow. The first step can be refreshingly concrete: one recurring job, one accountable person and a result the next colleague can use. Once that works, we have something real to improve and expand.
Which recurring job would your team gladly hand over, and what would they do with the time it gives back?