Prepare work for a human collaboration
Gather approved information, draft a response, and present supporting evidence. Keep the final decision with the person accountable for it.
Reliable agents. Explicit authority.
Build agent workflows with scoped authority, reviewable actions, and a clear path back to people when consequences rise.
Authority → action
Reliability lives in the whole workflow.
An agent needs more than instructions. Its tools, permissions, state, and approval steps shape what it can actually do. We design those boundaries around a useful task, then test the actions, exceptions, and recovery paths.
Where to start
What should your agent be allowed to do?
Act within a scoped harness
Connect an agent to a limited set of tools and permissions. Define allowed actions, validation rules, and the conditions that require approval.
Review an existing agent
Examine tool authority, execution traces, failure handling, and evaluation coverage. Identify the gaps that matter before expanding autonomy.
What we build
From intent to
operating practice.
A focused scope, useful deliverables, and evidence your team can review.
Authority & tool boundaries
An action inventory and permission model tied to the task. Specify what the agent may read, prepare, change, or escalate, and enforce limits in the tool layer.
Approvals & human handoffs
Review steps for consequential actions and a usable escalation path. Define who receives an exception and the context they need to resolve it.
Evaluation & action evidence
Representative scenarios covering correct actions, denied operations, misleading inputs, and incomplete evidence. Record the sequence needed to investigate an outcome.
Retries & recovery
Explicit timeout, retry, and stop conditions. Design for duplicate actions, interrupted work, and handoff to an operator when the workflow cannot continue.
How we work
One bounded engagement.
A clear next step.
Scope depends on your data, existing systems, access, and review capacity. We agree the work and its acceptance criteria before implementation begins.
Map the workflow
Identify the task, tools, consequences, and people accountable for the result.
Set the authority
Define allowed actions, approval thresholds, access boundaries, and stop conditions.
Test the exceptions
Exercise normal tasks, denied actions, ambiguous requests, interrupted work, and recovery.
Operate and reassess
Monitor outcomes, review incidents, and revisit permissions before increasing the agent’s scope.
Before we begin
Reliable Agents:
your questions.
What makes an agent different from an assistant?
For this service, an agent is a system that can advance a workflow through tools or actions. The design therefore considers permissions, state, approvals, and recovery alongside the quality of its responses.
Can an agent act without approval?
Only within the authority agreed for the workflow. We define which actions may proceed automatically, which need review, and which the system must never attempt.
Can you assess an agent we already built?
Yes. A review can examine tool access, instructions, execution behavior, evaluation coverage, approval steps, and operating evidence. Findings become a prioritized remediation plan.
How do you measure reliability?
We agree task-specific measures such as accepted outcomes, correct tool actions, denied-action handling, escalation quality, and recovery behavior. Results are reviewed with their limitations and the scope of the evaluation.
Start with your use case
What should your agents
make possible?
Bring a workflow, a tool integration, or a question about agent authority. Let’s define the next practical step.
Plan an Engagement