Next weekPublishing 8 min read
Your First Agent: How to Pick the One Workflow That Pays for Itself
The case for agentic AI is easy to accept in the abstract. The expensive mistakes happen at the very next step — choosing what to automate first. Most pilots that fail were not beaten by the technology; they were pointed at the wrong workflow for reasons that sounded good at the time.
What the article covers
- The five-question filter — frequency, rules, measurability, blast radius, and ownership — and why failing any one of the first three means picking something else.
- The tempting candidates that go wrong: the customer-facing showpiece, the judgment-heavy task, the workflow nobody owns, and the one that needs a whole platform before it can run once.
- How to scope a pilot that proves itself: baseline the numbers before you build, set the approval boundary explicitly, time-box it, and agree on what "it worked" means in advance.
For the owner or operator who has accepted the case for agentic AI and now has to decide where to point it first.
Do not want to wait for the article? We can talk through the bottleneck directly and work out whether it is the right place to start.