Choosing the first workflow to automate

The first agentic workflow you ship matters more than the second. It sets expectations — for the business, and for the team building it. Pick the wrong one and you spend months explaining a failure; pick the right one and you earn the right to do more.

Bounded

Start with work that has clear edges: a defined input, a defined output, and a defined owner. "Summarise the support tickets from yesterday and route them" is bounded. "Make the company more efficient" is not.

Observable

Pick a workflow where you can already see what good looks like. If you cannot tell whether a human did the task well, you will not be able to tell whether an agent did. Existing review steps, logs, or acceptance criteria are a good sign.

Forgiving

Choose work where a mistake is recoverable. Drafting, summarising, routing, and triaging are forgiving — a human reviews before anything irreversible happens. Work that moves money, deletes data, or changes production is not where to learn.

A useful first step

A good first workflow is bounded, observable, and forgiving. It produces something a human already checks. It lets you build the Ground, Orchestrate, and Prove disciplines around a small, real problem — and then expand from there.