article · cross business
AI agents explained for business owners
Understand what an AI agent can decide, compare it with a fixed workflow, and trace a sample support request before choosing a first business task.
Articles
Explanations and decision guides for business owners. Start with the foundation guide to agents, ordinary automation, and bounded AI-assisted workflows.
15 resources
article · cross business
AI agent, chatbot, or ordinary automation: which does this task need?
Compare ordinary automation, chatbots, fixed AI workflows, and agents using one support request and a decision table for choosing a suitable approach.
article · cross business
When not to use an AI agent
Recognize five situations where an AI agent is a poor first project, choose a concrete alternative, and record what must change before reconsidering.
article · cross business
How an AI agent chooses its next step
Trace an illustrative agent through approved order and knowledge lookups, application permission checks, stopping rules, and a human review boundary.
article · cross business
Choose your first AI workflow
Choose a bounded first workflow using a completed synthetic brief, a rejected broader candidate, and explicit checks for ownership, data, and fallback.
article · cross business
What an AI workflow costs to run
Estimate workflow operating cost with explicit variables, hypothetical USD inputs, setup separated from monthly costs, and sensitivity to review time.
article · customer support
Prepare your support knowledge before connecting AI
Prepare a small support FAQ with source IDs, ownership, revision dates, permitted answers, and escalation rules before connecting a drafting workflow.
article · customer support
Test a support workflow with normal and difficult requests
Test support drafts with eight normal and difficult cases, explicit routing expectations, source checks, human verdicts, and a record of corrections.
article · operations
Prevent duplicate records and recover from failed runs
Prevent repeated actions with stable keys, a durable ledger, atomic claims, bounded retries, and reconciliation when a destination may already have written.
article · sales
Check AI-generated commitments before you send a follow-up
Check follow-up commitments against meeting notes, reject invented prices and deadlines, and use an evidence table to preserve unresolved questions.
article · cross business
Decide which AI actions need human approval
Map reading, drafting, and writing permissions, bind human approval to an exact action, and define what happens when approval expires or never arrives.
article · operations
Prepare business data for a first AI workflow
Prepare approved sample data using field validation, source ownership, explicit missing values, synthetic records, and a careful redaction procedure.
article · cross business
Run a weekly maintenance check on an AI workflow
Run a weekly review of workflow failures, approvals, permissions, costs, sources, and test results, with a clear owner and evidence for restarting.
article · cross business
What to give an AI implementation consultant
Prepare a consultant handoff with a completed example, observable acceptance criteria, staged access, operating ownership, and practical exit questions.
article · cross business
Teach your team to review and run an AI workflow
Teach reviewers to check sources, reject unsupported promises, handle exceptions, and practice a workflow handoff with a named owner and backup.
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