What an AI agent is for

An AI agent is for delegating multi-step tasks you used to do yourself or had to chain together by hand: going through a folder of invoices and producing a summary, researching a topic across several websites and preparing a report, organising files or making changes to a website. It's for repetitive work above all, and for anything with clear steps.

In a small business, the most sensible uses tend to be internal tasks: preparing draft quotes from a template, keeping a data sheet up to date, sorting documents or answering first enquiries that a person then reviews. Where you shouldn't leave it on its own is anything with consequences that are hard to undo, like paying, deleting or writing to clients without supervision. Nor does it perform well with vague jobs: if you can't explain the task, it won't know how to do it either. What confuses people most is thinking it's good for everything and doesn't need watching.

I work with agents every day, and I answer the question of what they're really for through jobs that go well and others that don't. In "The problems of working with agents" I tell you what has happened to me working with them: what to watch out for, the rules I now apply and what they have actually given me.