When you hire a person, you are not hiring the person — you are hiring a function: triaging documents, first-line replies, reconciling payments. The person is how that function has always been filled. There is now another way to fill part of it, and it has no salary, no ceiling on hours and it does not take holiday.
That does not mean firing anyone. It means the repetitive, expensive functions in your operation can run with an agent doing the volume and a person doing the exception and the approval. The team moves up a level: off the line, into review.
If you cannot write the job description, you cannot automate the job either.
Hire the role, not the tool
The common mistake is starting with the tool. Start the way you would start a hire: write the job description. What comes in, what goes out, what counts as good work, who complains when it goes wrong. If the role does not hold together on paper, no agent will hold it together in production.
Three steps to test it this month
Pick an expensive, repetitive function. Document triage, first-line replies, reconciliation. High volume, a clear rule, and an error that is cheap to review.
Write down what "done well" means. Five real examples of an input and the output you would accept. Without them, nobody — person or agent — knows when they got it right.
Decide who approves. What goes out on its own and what waits for a person. At the start, everything waits. The limit opens as the track record builds.
Where this does not apply
An expensive decision does not go out alone — credit, health, contracts. And if the data behind the function is spread across five systems and three spreadsheets, fix the base first: an agent on top of wrong data only gets it wrong faster.
Want to know which function in your operation holds up on paper?
That is exactly what the diagnostic answers, in two weeks.
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