Enterprise DNA field guide

Deploy Your First Business Agent

A practical field guide for choosing one real workflow and turning it into a first-build brief.

Leave with a scored workflow, a clear handoff brief, and a build path for the first useful business agent.

Start with repeated work, not a tool demo.
Score the workflow before you spend time or money building.
Keep judgement with people.
Hand the repeatable pattern to the agent.

Step 1

Find the first-agent pattern

Choose workflows that fit one of these clean patterns.

Inbound triage
Something arrives and needs to be read, classified, routed, or summarized.
Repeat document assembly
The business creates the same kind of document with different facts each time.
Cross-system reconciliation
Two systems describe related work and a person keeps them aligned.
Owner-routed approval
A small decision waits on the owner because the context is scattered.

Step 2

Run the 30-minute workflow sprint

Minutes 0 to 5: list 5 to 10 workflows from the last month.

Minutes 5 to 15: match each workflow to triage, document assembly, reconciliation, approval, or none.

Minutes 15 to 25: score each workflow from 1 to 5.

Minutes 25 to 30: pick the winner unless there is a safety, privacy, or customer-risk reason not to start there.

Step 3

Score the opportunity

Workflow Pattern Frequency Time/run Owner Pattern fit Total
 
 
 
 
 

12 or below: keep looking. 13 to 15: run a small version one. 16 or above: scope properly before building.

Step 4

Write the first-build brief

Workflow: Trigger: What starts the workflow? Inputs: What does the agent need to read? Rules: What can the agent decide safely? Output: What should the agent produce? Human review point: Where does a person approve, edit, or reject the output? Systems touched: Which apps, folders, inboxes, databases, or spreadsheets are involved? Success measure: How will we know this worked?

Next step

Turn the brief into a business-agent build plan.

If the workflow touches customers, revenue, approvals, reporting, or owner bottlenecks, bring the completed brief to a scoping call with Sam.

Book a scoping call