How to prepare your organisation for AI agents

Most organisations that try AI agents start with the agent. They pick a tool, connect it to the inbox or the accounting system and ask it to help. The first results look good. Then the agent does something nobody expected, nobody can say why, and the pilot quietly stops.

The problem is rarely the model. The agent was asked to work in an organisation whose rules live in people’s heads, whose approvals happen in chats, and whose history of decisions is not written anywhere. A new employee in that situation would ask colleagues. An agent guesses.

So preparing for AI agents is mostly preparing the organisation, not choosing the agent.

What an agent needs that it cannot invent

We call the set of things an agent stands on its harness. It has five parts. Each one answers a question the agent would otherwise have to guess.

1. Written rules. What is allowed here? Payment limits, who signs what, which supplier needs which check, how fast a customer must get a reply. If a rule is not written down, the agent cannot follow it, and you cannot check that it did.

2. Company memory. What happened before? The contract with this supplier, the last three complaints from this customer, the reason the price changed in March. People carry this in their heads and inboxes. An agent needs it in a place it can read, with the source of each fact.

3. Checks. How do we know the work is right? The same checks a careful employee makes: does the invoice match the order and the delivery, is the counterparty still in good standing, is the amount within the limit. A check that is written once can be run by an agent on every case.

4. A decision log. Who decided, and why? Every decision on record: who made it, when, on what grounds, from which sources and under which version of the rule. Without it you cannot audit an agent, hand work over, or teach the agent from past cases.

5. Permissions. What may this agent do alone? Read, suggest, draft, record, act: each a separate right, given to each agent separately, with a named person who owns it. Money, law, signatures and anything sent outside the organisation stay with people.

None of these is about AI. They are what a well-run organisation has anyway. Agents simply make the gaps visible faster, because they cannot fill them with common sense.

A quick test: which parts do you have?

You can check your own organisation in ten minutes. For one process you know well, answer five questions honestly:

• Where are the rules for this process written? In a document people actually use, or in the heads of two senior staff?
• If a key person left tomorrow, where would their knowledge of past cases be?
• Which checks are made before the work moves on, and are they written as steps or done by feel?
• Can you find who approved a specific case last month, and on what grounds, in under five minutes?
• If an assistant joined this process tomorrow, would anyone know exactly what they are allowed to do alone?

Every “no” is a part of the harness that is missing. That is normal. Very few organisations have all five for even one process. The point of the test is to know where you stand before an agent is asked to work there.

On our harness check you can answer six such questions with buttons and see which parts of your frame exist, with first steps for the gaps.

Why start with one process

The usual reaction to the test is to plan a big programme: write down all the rules, clean all the data, then bring in agents. That takes a year and rarely finishes.

It works better the other way round. Take one process that hurts — payments that wait days for a signature, customer requests that get lost between email and chat — and build the whole harness for that process only.

Here is how it looks on a fictional company. Zarvane Trading Group pays its suppliers through a chain of people: a buyer confirms the delivery, an accountant matches the invoice, the finance director approves, the treasurer pays. Payments often wait.

Mapping this one process with the people who do it shows:

• The rules exist, but in three versions: the policy document, what the finance director actually applies, and what the accountants remember. The first job is to agree on one.
• The memory is spread between the accounting system, email and a shared spreadsheet of “special” suppliers. It gets one place, with sources.
• The checks — invoice against order and delivery, supplier still in good standing, amount within limit — are written as steps for the first time.
• The decision log starts with the next payment: every approval records who, when, why and under which rule.
• The permissions are set: an agent may match invoices and prepare the case for approval; it may not approve or pay.

After that, an agent has something to stand on. It checks every invoice the same way, shows its sources, and hands the decision to the finance director with the case already prepared. The person still decides. The difference is that they decide on a checked case instead of a pile of documents.

The Invoices module is built around exactly this flow, and counterparty checks cover the “still in good standing” part.

Who needs to be in the room

Preparing one process is not an IT project. Three groups need to take part:

• The people who do the work. They know where the real rules differ from the written ones. If they are not asked, the map describes how the work should run, not how it does.
• The owner of the process. Someone has to decide which version of a rule is the right one. Disagreements will come up; that is the useful part.
• Whoever is accountable for the risk. Usually finance or legal. They decide what an agent may never do alone.

In our own work we collect what already exists — documents, system records, conversations — and then check it with these people in short facilitated sessions, question by question, until the process is agreed. We describe this on the page about our approach.

Common mistakes

Buying the agent first. Tools are easy to buy and hard to stop. Without the harness, every result needs a person to check it from scratch, so the time saved is small and trust drops quickly.

Writing rules nobody uses. A rule document that the team does not recognise will be ignored by the team and followed by the agent, which is worse. Rules must be agreed with the people who apply them.

Treating permissions as all-or-nothing. Either the agent is “on” and does everything, or it is “off”. In practice each capability needs its own level, starting low and rising only with a record of good work.

Skipping the decision log. It feels like paperwork until the first audit, the first handover or the first time an agent makes a strange choice. Then it is the only thing that helps.

Where to start this week

1. Pick one process where work waits or gets lost.
2. Run the five-question test above with the people who do it.
3. Write down, on one page, the rules as they are really applied today.
4. Decide who owns the process and who decides on risk.
5. Only then ask what an agent could prepare in it.

If you want a second pair of eyes, bring the process to us. We map it with you — every step, who does it, where it waits and which steps an agent could prepare while your people decide. The process review is free.