Scope the agent to a bounded decision
Agents that succeed in enterprise settings do one bounded thing: triage an intake queue, reconcile a document against a purchase order, draft a first response for review. Agents that fail are asked to be generally helpful inside a regulated process.
Build the evaluation harness before the agent
A frozen set of two hundred representative cases with expected outcomes turns subjective judgement into a regression score. Without it, every prompt change is a guess and no release can be justified to a risk committee.
- Golden set curated with the business owner, not by engineering alone
- Automated scoring for structured outputs, sampled human review for judgement
- Release gate: no deployment below the agreed threshold
Human-in-the-loop is a design decision, not a fallback
Decide upfront which outcomes the agent may action autonomously, which it may draft for approval and which it must escalate untouched. Publish that matrix to the operations team. Confidence thresholds without a written matrix create ambiguity precisely when something goes wrong.
Observability, cost and rollback
Every tool call should be logged with inputs, outputs, latency and token spend, retained for the audit window the business requires. Set per-conversation and per-day ceilings, and keep the previous prompt and model version deployable behind a flag.
The twelve controls in short
Use this as the pre-go-live gate.
- Bounded scope with a written decision matrix
- Frozen evaluation set and release threshold
- Escalation path with named owners
- Full audit trail with retention policy
- PII handling and redaction rules
- Cost ceilings per conversation and per day
- Latency budget and graceful degradation
- Model and prompt version pinning
- One-click rollback
- Prompt-injection and tool-abuse testing
- Operator training and a feedback channel
- Post-deployment drift review on a schedule