Thirteen agent ideas grouped by sources, tools and approvals

Most lists of agent ideas are sorted by department: a few for sales, a few for support, a few for finance. That tells you who might want an agent, not whether it will work. A more useful sort is by what the agent needs: which sources it reads, which tools it calls, where a person has to say yes, and what output someone can check at the end. Ideas that share those needs also share their failure modes and their groundwork, so once you have built one, the others in its group come cheaper. The thirteen ideas below are grouped that way, followed by a simple method for picking your first.

Four things every agent idea needs

• Sources. What the agent reads: your own documents, a database, a set of approved outside sources. The narrower and better defined the sources, the easier the output is to trust.
• Tools. What the agent can do: search, read, extract, draft, update a record, send. Read-only tools carry little risk; tools that change or send things need limits.
• An approval point. The step where a person decides before the work has consequences beyond the agent's own sandbox. Some ideas need none, some need one, a few need several.
• A reviewable output. A table, a draft, a change list or a report in which every claim points to its source, so a reviewer can check it in minutes rather than redo it.

An idea is ready to build when you can fill in all four in a line each. If you cannot name the output a reviewer would check, the idea is still a wish.

The four groups below, at a glance:

Group 1: your own documents, read-only

These need an indexed document set, citations and no write access at all. They are the safest place to start.

• 1. Contract obligations register. Reads a folder of contracts and fills a table with renewal dates, notice periods and auto-renewal terms, each tied to a page and clause. A contract without the relevant clause is listed as “not found”, together with the pages checked.
• 2. Policy question desk. Answers staff questions from the handbook and internal policies, quoting the passage it relied on, and says plainly when a question is not covered.
• 3. Questionnaire first draft. Fills in security or procurement questionnaires from previously approved answers, citing the source answer for each, and flags questions with no approved answer for a specialist.
• 4. Meeting-to-decision log. Turns transcripts into a list of decisions, owners and open items, each linked to the line where it was said.

Typical failure: outdated documents treated as current, or answers without citations. Both are fixed by scoping the document set and requiring a quoted passage for every claim. Tools built for extraction with supporting passages fit this group well.

Group 2: outside sources under an allowlist

These read beyond your own walls, so they need an agreed list of sources, a retrieval date on everything and evidence attached to each finding.

• 5. Account brief before a call. Builds a one-page brief on a prospect from its own site, its filings and recent news, with every line sourced.
• 6. Competitor change digest. Summarises what changed on named competitors' pricing, product and documentation pages since the last digest. Setting up the watching side is covered in the guide to web change monitoring.
• 7. Regulatory update triage. Reads new publications from named regulators, summarises each one and suggests which internal policies might be affected, for a compliance owner to confirm.
• 8. Supplier risk screen. Checks a list of suppliers against agreed sources for closures, legal actions or sanctions listings, and reports “no source found” separately from “checked, nothing relevant”.

Typical failure: the agent quietly widens its sources, or cites a link that does not support the claim. Approve the source list up front, keep unsupported questions open instead of filling them, and spot-check citations against the passages they point to.

Group 3: tools that change things, behind an approval

These need write-capable tools, credentials scoped to the task and a pause before any consequential step.

• 9. Inbox triage with drafted replies. Sorts a shared inbox, drafts responses and routes unusual cases. Drafting happens freely; sending waits for a person.
• 10. CRM clean-up. Proposes merges of duplicate records and fixes to missing fields as a change list. Applying the list needs approval; deleting records needs an explicit, recorded decision.
• 11. Invoice-to-order matching. Matches invoices against purchase orders and delivery receipts, and queues mismatches with an explanation. It never pays anything; paying is a separate decision, as keeping money movement behind an explicit decision explains.

Typical failure: a credential granted for reading gets used for writing, or an approval granted once is treated as standing permission. Tie each approval to a single action and check it again when the action runs.

Group 4: recurring and multi-step work

These run on a schedule or span many steps, so they need durable execution, hard limits on time and spend, and an approved cadence.

• 12. Weekly operations report. Gathers figures from named systems, writes the narrative, highlights anomalies alongside the underlying data, and waits for review before it is distributed.
• 13. Dependency maintenance for a codebase. Opens a branch with dependency updates, runs the test suite and writes up what changed and what broke. A person reviews and merges. Development work with a reviewable result covers this kind of task.

Typical failure: a schedule keeps running after the reason for it has gone, or a long run produces an impressive report that nobody can trace. Give every recurring job an owner and an end condition.

How to pick your first agent

Score each candidate from zero to two on five questions and start with the highest total.

1. Does the work happen often enough that saving it matters?
2. Can a reviewer check the output in minutes?
3. Is it read-only, or does it have at most one approval point?
4. Is there a named person who will review every run?
5. Do you know how the work is done today, so you can compare?

In practice this usually points to Group 1, then Group 2, with Group 3 once your team trusts the reviews. Whatever you choose, start it read-only and write down what done means as acceptance criteria before the first run. For the questionnaire agent, a criterion could read:

Every question in the questionnaire has either a draft answer that cites the approved answer it reuses, or the label “needs specialist”. Draft answers add no commitment that the cited answer does not contain. Questions left open are listed together in one place.

Running these ideas in GoCux

In GoCux each idea becomes a work order: the goal, the scope it may touch and the acceptance criteria, with GoCux choosing the skills the work calls for. Group 1 ideas lean on project Knowledge search and Extraction, where every value arrives with its supporting passage and a value that cannot be found is left as unknown instead of guessed. Group 2 ideas start from a research plan with a source allowlist that someone approves before it runs; running the plan cannot add sources it did not include. Groups 3 and 4 meet the approval gate: sending things out, deleting, exporting data, scheduling, acting in a live session, rewriting the agent's own instructions and putting another agent to work all pause for someone on the team. The Task page shows how a work order moves from queued to done, with every step on the record.

Checklist for your first agent

• The goal fits in one sentence with a clear end state.
• The sources are listed, and anything outside the list is out of scope.
• The tool list is as short as the work allows; write tools are absent or behind approval.
• The approval points are named, along with who may approve.
• Acceptance criteria are written, and a colleague could check them without asking you.
• Time, tool-call and spend limits are set.
• Gaps in the output will be reported as gaps, not filled in.
• Someone owns the review of every run and knows how to stop the agent.