Getting an agent to take an action is the easy part. The real work is deciding what it may do unsupervised, where a person has to sign off, and how it behaves when something goes wrong.
What matters is how much the agent should be trusted to do without anyone watching, and the answer differs for every action it can take.
Deciding exactly what the agent may do alone, what needs approval, and what it must never attempt. Drawing that boundary is most of the design work.
Wiring the agent into the systems where work actually happens, such as your CRM, ticketing, and database, with the same permissions a person would get.
Approval steps placed where a mistake would be expensive, so the agent drafts and a person confirms rather than finding out afterwards.
Retries, timeouts, and a defined stopping condition. An agent that loops forever on an impossible task is the most common way these go wrong.
Every action logged with its reasoning and inputs, so when something odd happens you can reconstruct exactly what the agent did and why.
Scored runs against realistic scenarios, including the awkward ones. An agent that only works on the happy path isn't ready for anyone's inbox.
Agents fail in ways ordinary software doesn't: plausibly, confidently, and at speed. The containment has to be designed in rather than added after the first incident.
Agents almost always need to look things up first (see RAG development), and everything they do in production needs monitoring and guardrails.
Describe the task you'd hand to a junior colleague. We'll come back with what an agent can safely own, where the approval steps belong, and how we'd test it.