What agents actually add
Versus one-shot Q&A, agents add goal decomposition, tool use, state memory, and multi-step execution. They can create value — and travel farther down wrong paths. Managing agents with chatbot acceptance criteria underestimates operational risk.
Useful questions: which system states may the agent change? Is each step observable? When must it stop for a human?
Orchestration before personification
Product stories emphasize persona and autonomy; engineering reality needs clear workflows: triggers, tool inventories, read/write scope, compensating actions, and human nodes. If you cannot draw the orchestration, do not ship an “autonomous agent.”
Joined with process intelligence, agents act as a constrained execution layer inside defined business processes — not free roam across the enterprise.
Evaluation and drills
Beyond answer quality, evaluate tool-selection correctness, privilege-escalation attempts, long-horizon drift, and recovery. Run failure drills on synthetic and real tickets before launch; confirm monitoring and human takeover work.
Organizationally: who approves agent versions, who reviews knowledge and tool changes, who staffs incidents. Without owners, a tech pilot becomes unclaimed production liability.