Five essential agentic automation questions

Thinking of implementing agentic automation into your organisation? Before you do, ask yourself these essential questions

Agentic automation is rapidly emerging as a powerful approach within automation. Rather than simply deploying automated scripts to complete processes from behind the scenes, agentic automation introduces a digital agent that team members can interact with directly. This agent can proactively ask questions, seek clarifications, and deliver recommendations, but should always require human input and authorisation before completing tasks (especially ones that can have knock-on effects, such as pushing code). The result is an interactive, collaborative model that keeps people in the loop while still delivering substantial efficiency and operational gains.

The potential of agentic automation is clear: greater efficiency, reduced errors, and the ability to free up your talented people to focus on high-value work that benefits from human oversight and expertise. But before you dive in, it is vital to ask the right strategic questions to ensure a successful implementation.

Here are five essential questions to guide your organisation’s journey into agentic automation.

Question 1 – Where are your greatest opportunities for optimisation?

Before adopting any new technology, assess your current state. Can your existing processes be significantly improved with minor tweaks or by using tools you already have? Sometimes, a small change can deliver a substantial return and may be more practical to implement in the short term. This allows your organisation to build a foundation of efficiency before layering on more advanced solutions.

However, many organisations rely on legacy systems or mission-critical applications where changes are too risky or costly. This is where agentic automation truly shines. It can act as a digital layer over your existing infrastructure, introducing AI agents that automate workflows while still seeking input or approval from your team—no complete overhaul required. It provides a cost-effective path to modernisation, whether as an interim step or a permanent solution.

Agentic automation example: Finance

A global investment bank may struggle with its manual trade reconciliation process. Teams can spend thousands of hours each month comparing trade data from multiple systems, leading to delays and a high risk of human error. By implementing an agentic automation solution, the bank can deploy an AI agent to automate the entire reconciliation workflow. The agent could extract data from various sources, use machine learning to identify and flag discrepancies, and automatically resolve standard exceptions—always involving analysts for complex cases or final sign-off. This can reduce reconciliation time and allow analysts to focus on higher-value investigative work.

Question 2 – Are your business processes fully understood and documented?

The immediate answer from most leaders is ‘yes’. However, human-led processes often evolve organically over time. Team members discover shortcuts, create workarounds, and develop informal methods to get the job done faster. These small enhancements are rarely captured in official documentation, yet they are critical to how the process actually functions.

Launching an agentic automation project without a complete picture of these nuances is a recipe for failure. A thorough discovery and analysis phase is non-negotiable. This involves collaborating closely with end-users (the people who live and breathe these processes daily). Their insights into edge cases and exceptions are invaluable for ensuring your AI agent is set up to interact meaningfully with staff, making requests or asking clarifying questions as needed, and reflecting real-world practices.

Agentic automation example: Legal

A large law firm may want to speed up its contract review process. While they have a standard procedure, they may discover that senior paralegals use their own unwritten criteria to flag non-standard clauses for legal review. After working with paralegals to map out these intuitive decision-making processes, the firm can deploy an AI agent with Natural Language Processing (NLP). The agent would review thousands of contracts, identify high-risk clauses, and prompt legal reviewers for complex or unusual findings, ensuring the process remains robust and collaborative.

Question 3 – What tools are the right fit for your automation goals?

The market for agentic automation tools is evolving rapidly. Many business applications you already use, from providers like Microsoft and Google, now offer features that introduce interactive agents for handling straightforward tasks. These are excellent for supporting simple, known scenarios and are often easy to set up and maintain.

For more complex, end-to-end process automation across multiple applications, advanced agentic platforms (such as those offering conversational AI or integrated agent frameworks) provide more autonomy while ensuring user engagement and oversight. These tools require a greater investment but enable AI agents to manage workflows, interact with staff, and escalate to people for guidance or decisions whenever needed. Choosing the right platform depends on your specific goals, from targeted optimisations to whole-business transformation.

Agentic automation Example: Retail

Online retailers often face challenges with inventory management, leading to stockouts of popular items and overstocking of others. They could integrate an agentic platform with their existing supply chain systems. The AI agent analyses real-time sales data, social media trends, and competitor promotions to predict demand more accurately. When the agent encounters unusual patterns, it notifies the relevant team for input on appropriate actions. The system can then adjust stock levels, generate purchase orders, and could optimise pricing accordingly with human authorisation at key stages to avoid setting them too low.

Question 4 – How will you manage the cultural shift towards automation?

For leadership, the prospect of boosting efficiency through automation is exciting. For your frontline staff, however, terms like ‘automation’ and ‘AI agents’ can be daunting. It is crucial to address these concerns directly and frame the initiative in the right way. The most successful organisations position agentic automation as a collaborative tool—an agent to partner with employees, not replace them.

Encourage staff to see the agent as an ‘Automated Assistant’ designed to handle repetitive administrative work, but one that always asks for guidance when needed and never acts without human approval in ambiguous situations. The AI agent is effectively a trusted digital team member: available 24/7, able to ask the right questions, and ready to help when required. Framing the technology this way ensures employees feel empowered rather than displaced.

Agentic automation Example: Public Sector

A city council may need to improve the citizen experience for processing service requests, such as reporting potholes or missed bin collections. The manual process will no doubt be slow and prone to backlogs. By introducing an agentic solution, they could create a system where citizens report issues via a mobile app. The AI agent would interact with both citizens and staff, clarifying requests where necessary, generating work orders, and providing real-time status updates. Council employees would manage complex enquiries and provide authorisation where the situation requires human oversight, leading to higher job satisfaction and better public service outcomes.

Question 5 – How can you automate your most complex processes effectively?

With a thoughtful strategy and the right tools, almost any process can be automated through an agentic approach. The key to tackling complexity is to break down large, multi-step tasks into distinct interactions and decisions. Through careful discovery and analysis, you can design your AI agent to manage tasks it’s best suited for, while seamlessly involving people for inputs and sign-offs where needed. Working with a dedicated agentic automation consultancy provides the experience needed to identify opportunities and ensure the agent’s design truly supports your team.

A key benefit of agentic automation is its ability to control a series of ‘micro-tasks’, communicating with team members, distributing work, and escalating queries to human users at key decision points. This scalable, resilient digital workforce means that your most valuable colleagues spend their time where it matters most, with your AI agent ensuring a high level of control, oversight, and efficiency throughout.