Choose Your First Business Use Case

Your first agent should be boring. It should save real time, work on low-risk material and be easy to check. A flashy first project that fails teaches you that agents don't work. A boring one that works teaches you how to build the next one.

The people, companies and numbers in this lesson are made up. Check any figure against your own situation before you rely on it.

The Scoring Formula

Score each candidate from 1 to 5 on four things, where 5 is always the better answer for a first project:

• Frequency: 1 is a few times a year, 3 is about once a month, 5 is daily. Twelve client jobs each month counts as 4.
• Time: 1 is under five minutes each time, 5 is over an hour.
• Ease of checking: 1 means you can't tell if it's right, 5 means you can check it in a minute.
• Safety: 1 means a mistake costs money or trust, 5 means a mistake is cheap and private.

Multiply the four numbers. The maximum is 625. Rule: any candidate with a Safety score of 1 is never your first project, whatever its total. If two candidates tie, pick the higher Safety score.

A Filled Table (Maya, Made-Up Scores)

• Month-end summary for each client (12 clients a month) | Frequency 4 | Time 4 | Ease 4 | Safety 5 | Score 320
• Meeting notes to a task list | 4 | 2 | 5 | 5 | 200
• Research a new prospect before a call | 3 | 3 | 3 | 5 | 135
• Chase late invoices by email | 3 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 36
• Reply to client emails automatically | 5 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 30, and excluded by the safety rule

Maya picks the month-end summary: it happens every month for 12 clients, takes 30 minutes each, she can check it against the export, and the output goes to her drafts folder first.

Good First Projects

• A briefing before a call from public information and your notes.
• Sorting and labeling incoming email, with a person sending every reply.
• Turning meeting notes into a summary and a task list.
• Drafting first versions of recurring reports from a spreadsheet.
• Researching a list of companies and filling in a table with sources.

Poor First Projects

• Anything that sends money or changes billing.
• Anything that emails customers without review.
• Anything that needs access to systems you don't understand yet.

Common Mistakes

• Picking the most impressive task. Fix: pick the highest score, not the most exciting.
• Scoring ease of checking from hope. Fix: ask how you'd find out the output was wrong, and write it down.
• Skipping the safety rule because the total is high. Fix: treat a Safety score of 1 as a hard stop.

Exercise

• Score five candidates from your own work in the table format above.
• Pick the top one and write its goal in one sentence, plus what 'done' looks like and how you'll check it.
• Pass condition: five rows scored, no first choice with a Safety score of 1, and a done-test you could hand to someone else.