Typed intake and scope
Define required fields, valid values, acceptance and refusal criteria, the expected result, and the situations that must leave the workflow.
Build one AI-assisted workflow with clear authority.
A credible agent project can name the input, output, evidence, allowed tools, responsible person, and fallback for one job. A broad assistant hides those decisions and makes it harder to know when the system should act, ask, deny, or stop.
We design bounded assistants and agent workflows with typed intake, approved context, capability-limited tools, structured results, deterministic validation, provenance, evaluation, and human authority over consequential actions.
Bound the workflow before connecting tools
Approved context and provenance
Choose which records and documents may be retrieved, preserve source identity and freshness, and show the evidence behind reviewable results.
Limited capabilities
Expose only the tools and actions the job requires, with narrow inputs, permission checks, denials, and separate authority for sensitive steps.
Structured results and checks
Require a defined result shape, then apply deterministic validation before a result can advance, persist, or reach another system.
People retain authority over consequences
The authority model distinguishes drafts and recommendations from actions that change records, contact people, spend money, grant access, or otherwise affect the business. Each consequential step has an explicit approver, denial path, and recorded outcome.
When context is missing, validation fails, permission is absent, or a result falls outside the defined acceptance criteria, the system needs a clear response: ask for information, route to a person, produce a limited result, or stop.
Durable execution has explicit failure behavior
Work that crosses models, tools, queues, or external systems can outlive one request. Its state and recovery path need to remain understandable when a step is interrupted or repeated.
- Persist progress and checkpoints so operators can distinguish waiting, running, completed, failed, cancelled, and review-required work.
- Set bounded retry, timeout, and backoff behavior for model, retrieval, tool, and integration failures rather than repeating every step blindly.
- Use request identity, idempotency, and concurrency controls to prevent duplicate delivery or conflicting action where the workflow requires it.
- Define cancellation, partial-failure, compensation, resume, and manual-recovery behavior before the workflow reaches production.
- Limit sensitive inputs, stored context, logs, and result retention, and make privacy-sensitive diagnostic data an explicit design decision.
- Monitor model and prompt versions, retrieval sources, tool calls, validation failures, human overrides, denials, latency, cost boundaries, and recovery events.
What the client receives
The engagement produces a reviewable workflow definition, production controls, and evidence for deciding whether the system should proceed, change, or stop.
- A workflow and authority map covering typed intake, expected results, human roles, allowed actions, denied actions, escalation, and fallback.
- Approved-context, retrieval, provenance, tool-capability, permission, structured-output, and deterministic-validation specifications.
- An evaluation set and scorecard covering intended cases, edge cases, unacceptable actions, abstention or denial, evidence quality, and human review burden.
- A durable-execution design for state, retries, duplicates, concurrency, cancellation, partial failure, checkpoints, and operator recovery.
- A privacy, monitoring, and controlled-rollout plan with production gates, a limited release path, stop conditions, rollback or disable controls, and a non-model fallback.
- Runbooks, decision records, operating documentation, and ownership boundaries for the team reviewing and supporting the workflow.
Related routes
One agent workflow may depend on governance decisions, dependable system handoffs, or architecture work around the application and data it touches.
When this is the right fit
This is useful when a team can name one repeatable workflow, the approved information it may use, the result a person will review, and the action or decision that remains under human authority.