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What should an owner check before using an agent?

Check what it can access and change, who reviews outputs and how mistakes are reversed.

The short answer

Separate sending, payments, deletion and external commitments. A pilot does not need access to every business system.

Try it in three steps

  • Choose a sanitized (with identifying personal or client details removed), read-only practice workflow.
  • Test normal, incomplete and failed cases.
  • Assign an owner and a human takeover path.

A practice prompt

Before you start

Create a checklist without connecting live systems.

Practice material (fictional)

Pilot: summarize practice material. Scope: read practice only, write draft.txt, send nothing; colleague Zhou reviews.

Replace placeholders in the prompt with this material, or append the material if there are no placeholders. Reading time excludes doing the exercise.

Create a pre-use checklist for this filing workflow: access, writes, reviewer and recovery. Do not claim checks have passed.

What to look for (not a recorded test result)

Include access, output, review and recovery, leaving actual results untested rather than marking them passed.

If it goes wrong

If no reviewer owns the output, keep it out of automatic business writes.

Check your result

Pilot ownership and an exit path are clear before expansion.

References and scope

The links below support the concepts or product navigation. The steps and exercises are our teaching suggestions, not official certification or measured customer outcomes. Product interfaces and availability may change. References checked on 2026-10-17.

Start with one task

Describe the current process and its slowest step. The initial conversation is free.

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