BlogsSep 22, 2026
The way you agentify matters.
Making one task cheaper doesn’t necessarily make the whole operation better.
By Walid Negm
Making one task cheaper doesn’t necessarily make the whole operation better.
Change who does the work or how the work is organized, and you can change capacity, coordination, review, control, reliability and the consequences of getting it wrong.
Sometimes an agent should reason or propose. Sometimes agents working together create new possibilities. Sometimes conventional software or a deterministic route is the better design.
An agent could do something and an agent should be allowed to do it are different questions.
A fixed process staffed entirely by people
The same authored route with mixed performers — people, AI agents and software taking the steps each is suited to perform
Every case is forced down one path
An authored decision takes one branch; a rule picks it, and the rest of the route stays intact
Independent checks wait in a single queue
One split, independent branches in parallel, then one join
Rework is an informal send-back
An authored loop, with a rule that stops it
Sequential incident escalation
A route that can hand off to an incident lead — human or agent — that assigns specialists dynamically as the situation develops
The lead works a plan written in advance
The same lead, writing its plan at run time as the situation develops
A centrally routed patient case
Specialist handoff where human and agent participants can pass the case directly and ownership actually moves with it
One person signs off while the others wait
Everyone judges the same thing, and a rule settles it
A manager assigns every job
A task market where eligible people or agents evaluate announced work, bid or claim it, and an allocation rule awards it
A fixed replenishment process
An adaptive shared board where procurement, logistics and planning agents watch shared state and act when their conditions are met
An unstructured “agent swarm”
A governed agent network with explicit interaction rights, authority and settlement — whether the underlying arrangement is a peer network, shared board, handoff or something else