Agents that do real work under process control.
Agents read evidence, return structured fields, and call only the tools they are allowed to use. The workflow decides when they run, when they stop, and who approves the outcome.
Agent task anatomy
One bounded worker inside one workflow step.
Step
Extract invoice fields
Allowed tools
Reader, validator, risk screen
Human gate
Required above policy threshold
Trace
Prompt, tool calls, output, reviewer
What agents are
Not chatbots. Not scripts. Process workers.
The simple version: an agent is software that can understand context, choose an action, use tools, and produce work. The enterprise version needs boundaries, approvals, and a trace.
An agent is a bounded worker
It receives a task, reads the context, decides what to do next, and returns structured work.
A workflow tells it when to act
The agent does not wander across the company. A process step gives it a specific job.
Governance tells it what is allowed
Tool access, data scope, approval rules, and output schemas are defined before it runs.
You are the supply planning agent for the North America S&OP cycle.
Use approved demand, inventory, capacity, and assumptions sources to compare feasible plans.
Produce three options with service, margin, and expedite-risk tradeoffs.
Summarize the recommendation and wait for planner approval before any system writeback.
Invoice extractor agent · version 7 · deployed to production
Define the job before the model starts reasoning.
A useful production agent is not just a prompt. It is a versioned unit of work with inputs, outputs, tools, policies, evals, owners, and deployment history.
Instructions
What the agent is responsible for and what it must not do.
Output schema
The exact structured result the workflow expects back.
Tools
The approved functions and systems it may call.
Policy
Confidence, risk, cost, and approval rules for the step.
Frameworks make agents easy. Keeping them safe takes primitives.
Inputs and outputs are enforced
The agent receives clear evidence and returns structured fields. Schema drift fails in staging, not silently in production.
Every call scoped, rate-limited, logged
Tools declared as typed functions. Authn, scopes, and rate limits live with the tool — not in ad-hoc middleware.
Swap models, keep workflows
Change the model behind an agent without rewriting the process. Define fallback chains per step.
Define. Evaluate. Deploy. Observe.
Define
Schema-first agent: inputs, outputs, tools, model, evals.
Evaluate
Run a golden test set. Regressions block the deploy.
Deploy
Agent work runs as a versioned, replayable activity.
Observe
Every invocation traced — prompt, tools, tokens, cost.
Build agents your operations team can actually trust.
We'll scope one agent for one workflow — end-to-end, production-ready.