7 minute read
The question we hear most often from organizations considering agentic AI is not "can agents help us?" — most leaders have accepted by now that they can. The question is "where do we start?"
The answer is almost never "build something ambitious." The answer is: find the smallest meaningful workflow you can fully describe, and build that.
The Profile of a Good First Workflow
A good first agentic workflow has four characteristics. It is repetitive — the same steps run over and over, ideally dozens or hundreds of times per day. It is rule-based — a human doing the work could write down the decision logic if pressed. It has a clear start and a clear end. And it has a measurable outcome, so you know whether the agent is doing it right.
Customer intake processing, document classification, status update notifications, routine data reconciliation — these are the workflows that make good first deployments. They are not glamorous, but they are where you build operational confidence in agentic systems.
The Steps We Walk Every Client Through
First, map the workflow completely. Every step, every decision point, every exception case. This mapping exercise usually takes longer than clients expect, and it almost always surfaces process debt that predates any AI conversation.
Second, identify the escalation cases. What are the inputs or states where the agent should stop and involve a human? Defining this up front is not optional — it is the difference between a system that earns trust and one that erodes it.
Third, build the minimum viable version. Not the full vision. The first version that handles the core case reliably. Ship it, watch it, tune it.
Fourth, measure and expand. Once you have a working agent on a narrow workflow, you have the organizational vocabulary to expand. You know how to describe scope, how to design escalation paths, how to audit agent behavior.
The Mistake to Avoid
The most common failure mode in first agentic deployments is starting with too much scope. An agent that handles one workflow well is worth far more than an agent that handles five workflows poorly.
Ready to identify your first workflow? We run scoping workshops for exactly this purpose.