Good fits

AI agents earn their keep on tasks that are repetitive, well-defined, and forgiving of the occasional miss: drafting first-pass responses, triaging incoming requests, summarizing long threads before a human decides what matters.

Poor fits

They struggle where a mistake is expensive and infrequent — a once-a-quarter compliance filing, a customer refund decision with no clear pattern. The rarity means the agent never really learns the edge cases, and the cost of the miss is high.

Our rule of thumb: automate the task first with simple rules and see how far that gets you. Bring in an agent only where the task genuinely requires judgment across too many variables for a rulebook to cover.

The best use of an AI agent is often the task right before the one everyone assumes it should do.