Vertical II · Workflow Automation Service 04 of 08
AI Agent Development
Software that carries out multi-step operational work end to end — reading, deciding, acting in your systems, and handing back to a person when it should.
Run log · invoice intake
- 09:02Invoice PDF read · vendor matched
- 09:02Validated against PO and goods receipt
- 09:03Above value gate → sent for approval
- 11:40Approved by Finance · posted
- 11:40Inputs, reasoning and result logged
- Value gate
- Above your limit, an approval step comes before any posting.
- Blocked actions
- Configured by you and enforced outside the model — for example, changing a vendor’s bank details.
- Deterministic core
- Calculations, postings and compliance logic run as code. The model interprets; it does not add up.
How we build them responsibly
- Narrow scope
- An agent owns one workflow with defined inputs and a defined finish line. General-purpose agents pointed at a whole business fail in ways that are expensive and hard to trace.
- Deterministic core
- Calculations, postings and compliance logic run as code. The model is used for interpretation and judgment — the parts code genuinely cannot express.
- Guardrails and gates
- Value thresholds, approval steps and blocked-action lists are configured by you, enforced outside the model, and cannot be talked around.
- Confidence handoff
- Below an agreed confidence level the agent stops and asks. A system that escalates is safe; a system that guesses confidently is a liability.
- Full audit log
- Every action recorded with its inputs, its reasoning and its result — reviewable, and reversible where the underlying system allows it.
Typical deployments
- Document intake — invoices, POs, delivery notes and bank advices read, validated against the source record, and posted or queued.
- Exception handling — the cases that fall out of an automated process because they do not fit the expected format.
- Follow-up loops — chasing a missing document or an unconfirmed delivery until it arrives or a person takes it over.
- Monitoring and triage — watching a queue continuously and deciding what deserves a human’s attention today.
What you gain
Work continues when nobody is available to do it, and the messy cases stop being dropped into a pile. A rule engine cannot express “this invoice looks wrong” — it can only check the fields someone anticipated. Agents handle the cases in between, which in most operations is where the cost sits.
The practical effect is that volume growth stops translating directly into headcount growth, and your experienced people spend their day on the exceptions rather than on the throughput.
Best fit when the work is repetitive but needs judgment, volume is high enough that consistency has become a problem, and the cost of a silent failure is high enough to justify guardrails.