Give an AI agent a job it can finish safely.
A field checklist for turning a business task into an agent workflow—with clear limits, human approvals and a plan for when something goes wrong.
Start with the workflow, not the model
KrillOps planning has explored agents for research, office work, outreach drafts and phone handling. The plans include task queues, review steps and unfinished integration work. They are design records, not proof of successful customer deployments or measured savings.
Before automating a task, write down who owns it today, what information it needs, what a correct result looks like and who can approve consequential actions. If those answers are unclear, the task is not ready to run unattended.
The agent task safety checklist
Define these seven things before you connect tools
- One bounded job: name the trigger, expected input and specific output.
- Allowed information: list the files, records and services the agent may read. Exclude unrelated or sensitive data.
- Allowed actions: separate read-only work and drafts from actions that change records, contact people or spend money.
- Approval points: require a person to review external messages, financial actions and irreversible changes.
- Stop conditions: say what missing data, low confidence, conflicting instructions or tool errors should make the agent stop and ask.
- Failure path: define who is alerted, what is saved for diagnosis and how a person can complete the task manually.
- Audit trail: retain the input reference, tool actions, result, approvals and final outcome for an appropriate period.
Start in draft or read-only mode. Review a sample of outputs, including cases that should fail, before granting permission to act. Expand access one action at a time and keep a human fallback.