Your First AI Agent

Inside the playbook

1. 01

   Choose the workflow

   Frequent, digital, easy to check and low risk. Score your candidates.

2. 02

   Define the agent's job

   Goal, trigger, tools, steps, outputs, hard limits and when to hand over.

3. 03

   Set human approvals

   Autonomy levels, an approval matrix and a fast, logged approval step.

4. 04

   Pick how to build it

   Assistant with connectors, workflow tool, agent builder or custom code.

5. 05

   Launch a pilot

   Shadow, assisted, supervised. Then decide on numbers agreed up front.

6. 06

   Run it safely

   Ownership, what to watch, common failure modes and an off switch.

You also get

• Assistant, automation or agent: what the difference is
• How to pick the right first workflow
• The agent job description, with a worked example
• Five autonomy levels and an approval matrix
• Four ways to build, and what to ask any platform
• A six-week pilot plan with go-live measures
• Monitoring, failure modes and the off switch
• The one-page Agent Canvas

Who it's for

Made for operations leaders, team leads and AI leads. A designed, illustrated PDF to read and share, plus an editable Word version. Every chapter ends with decisions to make, and every [bracketed field] is yours to fill in.