What an agent is, and what one could do for you
People ask me about agents more than anything else, and most of what they have heard is either a chat box or a robot. Here is what I mean by the word, what mine do every day, and what they will never do.
What it is
An agent is a program that can read your business records, understand a request in plain words, and do a limited set of things about it. That is the whole idea. Chatting with it is one way to use it, but not the point.
Most of mine work without anyone typing to them. One runs at six in the morning. One wakes up when a document lands in a folder. One wakes up when a mail arrives. They read, they sort, they write, they file, and they leave a note when something needs a person. You could call them workflows with judgement. Where the judgement is wrong, they say so instead of guessing.
The difference from an ordinary automation is that an agent can handle the messy middle. A rule can file an invoice from a known supplier. An agent can read an invoice it has never seen, work out who it is from and which job it belongs to, notice it looks like one you already paid, and ask you about that instead of filing it twice.
What mine do today
Six of them run my own company. They are all on the Systems page in more detail.
- One reads every receipt and invoice that arrives, files it, and records the expense.
- One handles my mail: files what needs no reply, drafts what does, checks every fact in the draft, and never sends.
- One writes the daily report from the records, for the company and for each customer.
- One maps every system I have each morning and flags anything that changed.
- One checks the numbers overnight and writes up anything that does not add up.
- One answers questions in Teams from the live records, and tells you where each answer came from.
What one could do for you
The right size depends on how many of your systems it has to be connected to, and how tidy the records are that it reads. The intelligence is the same at every size. The plumbing is not.
Small. Days, not weeks.
- When a supplier's invoice arrives by email, read it, file it and put it in front of the right person.
- Every Friday, text the foreman the list of inspections that haven't come in.
- When a customer emails asking where their job stands, draft the reply from the project record and leave it for you to send.
Medium. A few weeks.
- Read every daily report from the field, post the hours and quantities to the job, and flag the ones that don't match the plan.
- Take a photo of a receipt by text, code it to the job from a few spoken words, and route it for approval.
- Watch the equipment hours and tell the mechanic which machines are due for service, before they are down.
Large. Connected to the whole business.
- Field, accounting and payroll fed from one set of records, with the cost of each unit of work visible while the work is still going.
- A page you open in the morning that says what needs you, what happened, and what changed, with an agent behind each line.
A surprising amount of the value is in the small ones. A business that gets its paperwork filed and its bills in front of the right person has fixed most of what was costing it afternoons. Start there, and the larger ones are built on records that are already clean.
What it will never do
These are not settings. They are how the thing is built, so they hold whatever anyone types at it.
What it needs from you
Records it can read. If the number lives in someone's head or on a whiteboard, the agent cannot see it. Often the first job is getting the information out of heads and into a place where it can be read. That is also usually where the biggest saving is.
A decision about what it may change. A short list. You can add to it later once you trust it.
Somewhere to run. Microsoft 365 if you have it, which most businesses do. Your own cloud account if you don't.
One person who owns it. Someone in your business who looks at what it flagged and makes the call. It is built to make that person's morning short, not to replace them.
Have a job in mind for one?
Describe the task the way you'd describe it to a new hire, and I'll tell you what size it is.
Or take the first look: six taps, one page, no email needed.