Working With Agents
A field guide for professionals who direct AI, not just use it. Directing agents well is a skill. Not prompt engineering. Something deeper.
What Agents Actually Are
This is not a prompt engineering tutorial. It is a guide for professionals who have realised that using AI is not the same as working with it, and who want to get serious about the difference.
An AI agent is a system that can take a goal, break it into steps, execute those steps, evaluate the results, and adjust. Unlike a simple chatbot, an agent interprets your goal and makes decisions about how to get there.
This is why directing agents is a skill, not just a feature you turn on.
Agents are strong at
- Structured tasks with clear success criteria
- Research and synthesis across large volumes
- First drafts of standardised documents
- Data analysis and anomaly detection
- Rapid iteration, ten variations at once
Agents struggle with
- Knowing when the brief is wrong
- Applying context you have not articulated
- Recognising emotional dynamics
- Decisions with ambiguous long-term consequences
- Genuinely novel ideas outside their training
The Three Layers of Directing Agents
Most people interact with agents at one layer. Professionals who get exceptional results operate at all three.
Building Agent Workflows
Pick one workflow from your week and redesign it around agent collaboration. For each step, classify it:
Common Mistakes
Your First Week Protocol
One workflow. Five days. A reflection worth more than any certification.
Reflect, on yourself, not the tool
What did this reveal about your expertise? What do you know that you could not articulate before? Where is your judgment most valuable, and where were you just performing tasks?
Ready to go deeper?
Managing Disruptions offers AI Strategy Sprints and Team AI Training built around these principles, not tool tutorials, but the judgment and workflow design that make AI actually work.