How do you know your business is ready for an AI agent?

QWhat is agentic AI?

Agentic AI is AI that takes a goal and works through several steps to reach it, using tools and making small decisions along the way. It moves from answering questions to completing tasks.

A regular AI tool drafts the email when asked. An agentic system can look up the contact, draft the email, send it at the right time, and set a follow-up if there’s no reply. You set the goal and the rules. You review the outcome. The agent doesn’t decide what good looks like, and it doesn’t catch its own errors. You do.

QDo you need a documented workflow before using an AI agent?

Yes. If the steps aren’t written down, you don’t know what you’re asking the agent to do. You’ll find the gaps when it follows your instructions exactly and gets it wrong.

Walk the task from trigger to finish. Write what happens at each step, who is responsible, and what the step looks like when it’s done right. That document becomes the agent’s instructions. If you can’t write it cleanly in about half an hour, fix the workflow first.

QHow do you set a quality standard for AI agent output?

Write five yes-or-no questions that define acceptable output for the task. If every answer is yes, it passes. If any answer is no, it gets rejected and rerun.

For a client follow-up email, the questions might be:

1. Does the tone match our voice?
2. Are the facts accurate?
3. Does it mention this client’s specific situation?
4. Is the next step clear?
5. Would we send it without editing?

“I’ll know it when I see it” isn’t a standard. If fixing the output regularly takes longer than a short, set limit, the problem is in the instructions, not the reviewer.

QWho should review an AI agent’s work?

One named person, not a rotation and not “whoever has time.” They own the checklist and have the authority to reject output and send it back before it reaches anyone.

Automation doesn’t remove the person. It moves them from doing the work to reviewing it. When nobody owns review, quality slips quietly for weeks before a customer notices. See Who should review AI output before it goes out?

QCan an AI agent fix an inconsistent process?

No. An agent automates the inconsistency and runs it faster, with less visibility. The best tasks for agents already work the same way every time and are slow only because they’re manual.

Look at the last ten times the task was done. Did the output look the same? Did people follow the same steps? If not, run it by hand the same way for about a month, then hand it to an agent.

QWhat is the readiness checklist for an AI agent?

Check four signals: documented workflow, written output standard, named reviewer, and consistent manual execution. All four present: deploy. One missing: fix it first. Two or more missing: build the foundation.

QHow do you deploy an AI agent responsibly?

Put a person at every high-stakes step, log what the agent does, and run it alongside your manual process before you rely on it. Loosen oversight only as it earns trust.

1. List every step where the agent decides something or takes an action.
2. Mark each one low-stakes or high-stakes.
3. Require human approval at every high-stakes step: money, contracts, sensitive customer messages.
4. Log what the agent did and why, and set alerts for output outside the normal range.
5. Run it next to the manual process for a couple of weeks, then review the log weekly.

Watch for silent failure: a small mistake early in the chain that carries through later steps before anyone sees it.