# What could an agent do here?

A thinking board, not a lesson. Four piles of tiles and one sentence frame:

> When **[a situation from your week]**, an agent could **[do something]**
> using **[something you already have]**, so that **[something changes]**.

Most conversations about agents start with the technology and work backwards to
a problem, which is how organisations end up owning software nobody uses. This
does it the other way round. Read the sentence out loud. Some will sound daft —
a sentence that sounds daft in a meeting was never a plan.

Works best with a team, out loud, in about twenty minutes. Nothing is sent
anywhere and nothing is stored; print the sheet to keep it.

## The four piles

**When this happens** — twelve situations from ordinary UK working weeks: a form
that sits for three days, a policy where the answer is on page 41, a rota only
one person understands, somebody checking every single one just in case.

**An agent could** — ten things worth asking for: read it and pull out what
matters, draft a first version for a person to check, flag only the ones that
need a human, fill in the parts it can and stop.

**Using** — ten things an organisation already has: SharePoint documents, the
shared mailbox, a Teams channel, the policy library, the forms people already
fill in.

**So that** — eight outcomes: nobody waits three days, the answer is the same
whoever asks, a person only sees the exceptions, one person stops being the only
one who knows.

## Before anybody buys anything

A sentence you like is not a business case. Three things decide whether it is
worth doing, and none of them are on the board:

- How often does it actually happen? Count it for a week before you guess.
- What happens when it gets it wrong? If somebody is refused a repair, a person
  checks every one, and the saving is smaller than the pitch said.
- Who is left out? If the person doing the job today cannot use the thing that
  replaces it, the work has moved, not gone.

The useful next step is usually not a pilot. It is finding out where the team
actually is and reading the floor rather than the average — see
[find your starting point](/start/#team).

If the word "agent" means nothing yet, start with
[What AI at work actually means](/learn/ai/what-ai-at-work-actually-means/),
eight minutes.

Use the board at [howtobedigital.com/agents/](/agents/).