Industries
Systems that take actions across tools.
How to choose · AI agents
Judge an agent platform by how safely it can act, not by how clever it sounds. Check tool and permission scoping, human approval steps, logging of every action, the ability to test on realistic scenarios, failure handling, and how costs scale with task length. A narrow, well-bounded agent beats a general one that nobody can audit.
Comparison · AI agents
Use the most deterministic tool that does the job. Scripts and API integrations suit stable, structured processes; robotic process automation helps where only a screen interface exists; agents fit variable, language-heavy work where rules cannot be fully specified. Predictability, auditability and maintenance burden usually favour simpler tools until the input genuinely varies.
Problems & fixes · AI agents
Agents fail in recognisable ways: wrong tool choices, compounding errors across steps, endless loops, obeying instructions hidden in untrusted content, and acting with more permission than the task needs. Contain these with least-privilege credentials, approval on consequential actions, hard limits on steps and spend, isolated handling of external content, and replayable logs.
Requirements · AI agents
Before granting access, you need a defined task and owner, dedicated low-privilege credentials, a data classification of everything reachable, approval rules, logging with retention, a tested stop procedure, and agreement on who answers for outcomes. Without these, the agent inherits the access of whoever set it up, and nobody can reconstruct what it did.