AI & Technology
7 min
Agents on the payroll: when software does the routine work
AI agents are moving from pilots into daily operations. The hard questions are about ownership, not technology.
Saskia Brandt
Partner
A year ago most companies were running AI pilots. Now some are running agents that file, reconcile and draft work every day. The technology works well enough. The organisation around it often doesn’t.
Who owns the work?
When an agent prepares a payment run, someone still owns the payment. The companies doing this well write that down for every process: what the agent does, what a person checks, and who answers when it goes wrong.
What to measure
Count hours returned to the team and errors caught, not the number of agents. One well-run agent in accounts payable is worth more than ten in a sandbox.
