How to Use AI Agents the RIGHT Way as an Enterprise

If you've got AI agents running across your organization, some of them are likely trying to do things right now that your rules don't allow. And every time that happens, an escalation or approval request goes to somebody on your team who stops what they're doing and deals with it. And that person spends time on the request, approves it, denies it, and goes back to what they were doing. Seems right. But was the escalation routine? Was it extraordinary? Does something need to change? Is there a better way to do it? What's the opportunity? What's What's the new idea? What's the insight? Almost no one is capturing any of that right now. I've spent 20 years inside enterprise software, and this is the biggest reason I see people completely plateauing when it comes to how much their company could get out of automation with AI and how many new capabilities they could deploy. And it's why companies are not taking advantage of these signals. This is why they will be left in the dust by their competition. So in this video, I'm going to show you the right way to use AI agents so that you can keep automating more and more of the work your team is doing manually. And even more importantly, so you can identify the opportunities that are only now presenting themselves to you so you can grow your company faster. So look, whether your agents ever take on more work than they're doing today depends on 3 things being in place at the same time: your company mindset, your company's skill set, and your company's purpose-built AI toolset. Most organizations I've worked with only get One or two of them, and that's exactly why their agent program never compounds. First off, mindset is about what your team does when an agent gets stopped by one of your rules, policies, or guardrails, or it gets stopped by an ambiguity, or you identify a potential rogue agent. Usually most teams are looking to ensure this doesn't happen again. They focus on updating the rule to ensure tighter control, and that's important. You need control and you need confidence in your agents, so you need to quickly update Update the rule set so you can move on. I built FourSQLs to provide agent guardrail control and escalation management across every one of your agents just to handle this. You can try it for free in the link below. But back to mindset. But the thing to remember is control for the sake of control is the trap. That's the exact wrong mindset. The knee-jerk reaction is just lock down the agent with tighter control. And at most organizations, more control is the default. It gets done and your agents get more restricted. And yes, control is part of the answer. You don't want someone to have to manually manage this escalation repeatedly, and you don't want risk in your agent's operation or in your business. But is it all of the opportunity? What should I learn beyond the risk? That's the key change in mindset. The right mindset is asking what that agent saw that you didn't. This is the key change in how you need to think about your business today, because this is the opportunity to learn. Learn something potentially important, and it only gets presented in this exact moment when an agent is making a decision. This is the transition from the moment when humans made decisions to when agents made decisions, and you need to dig into those decisions. It's in the escalation itself. This is the new opportunity to learn, and if you miss the opportunity to learn, it's gone. The context window closes the moment it's gone, and because you changed the rule and made the rule tighter, you lock down the agents so this doesn't happen again. It won't present itself. Again, this opportunity is lost. It won't show up in a dashboard later. It's gone. If you don't learn in that moment, you miss it forever. Again, the new critical mindset is leaning in and asking what the agent saw that you didn't. What happened that you didn't expect? Why didn't you expect it? What can you learn from this? Is there an opportunity to have better control? Is there an opportunity to be even more efficient? Is there an opportunity to take advantage of something that presented itself or that you just understood for the first time? Is there an opportunity to add incremental capabilities for your team, for your customer? Should you build a new agent, deploy a new agent in the workflow? Every escalation is one of your new signals. You need to unlock these signals. So you need to be able to capture every escalation, all the context, and start trying to learn. This is your new biggest business opportunity. This is why your business team, not your IT team, needs to operationalize how you work with your AI agents. And how your business team leans into these signals. Like I said before, I built Force Equals to help companies do all of this. But let's move on to skillset. Then you have skillset, which is whether your team can tell which of these requests to act on. Some escalations will be technical in nature. They're pretty straightforward. However, the vast majority of your escalations won't be technical or monolithic rules that your IT or dev team deploy into your AI plumbing. Most of the escalations will be completely at the business level in adjusting to the nuance of how your agents make their decisions when they interact with the real world individually and as a group of agents as you deploy them into your workflows. And to handle this nuance, every escalation will need to be sent to where expertise and authority merge. And that'll be unique for every escalation type and every agent and every workflow across your business that you deploy agents to. That's where somebody understands what's happening in that escalation at the business level, combined with somebody that has the authority to make the call for the business. That could be different people for every escalation. It could be one person, 2 people, or more people that need to collaborate to understand it, make decisions, take action, and learn. You don't have an escalation system to handle this in your business today because it has to be able to find the right people fast Present all the context, enable collaboration, enable the capture of the decision, and then automatically take action to approve it, deny it, or whatever to free up that agent. You need to capture what you learn. Is there a required change? Does your agent need better rules? Does the workflow require change? Can we add a new agent that adds incremental efficiency or capabilities? What does AI suggest in this moment? You need to capture this in the moment or you lose it forever. Escalation system needs to help with all of this intelligently and efficiently for every escalation. It needs to help enable the change or additions that you discovered. You need to be able to operationalize making and deploying those potential opportunities. And you don't have a system to do this yet in your business. And now it's critical to have it or you miss out on this important learning opportunity for your organization. So at the skill set level, is your business team Ready to lean into these escalations? Do they know how important this is? Are they ready to manage the escalations? Are they ready to learn? Are they excited to do this? Every single one of your line of business leaders should recognize this as the most critical opportunity to move the needle for the business. This is a skill, and it only develops if your team sees enough requests by the agents to start recognizing this as the opportunity they need to lean into. And finally, we have toolset, which is whether you're set up to do. Everything we just talked about. This means for every agent you deploy across every system, no matter who builds it, where it's built, where the agents are run, you need a toolset that enables this across your entire system. First, you need a single place to manage agent governance, guardrails, business rules, policy, down to the actual agent workflow that controls at the agent level for any group of agents, any business unit, or across the organization with any organization structure in your company. That's the only way you can ensure you don't have gaps. Only with a system that does this will you have actual business control and not lose control in the edges and in the gaps. Your IT team may say they already have something like this. Don't believe them without thorough consultation because unless it was purpose-built for operationalizing AI agents, it won't work in practice. IT looks at agent control and guardrails around data access and identity, PII access, all important, but none of that helps you operate and adjust the agents at the business level. Second, you need a single system, a single place where every human-in-the-loop action or escalation shows up. You can't try to manage escalations in multiple systems. If someone on your team interacts with 20 different agents, they won't log into 20 different places set up in 20 different ways and figure that out. More importantly, a lot of escalations will happen at the group level, meaning every agent is working perfectly by itself, but together there's an anomaly, or together they're making a decision that adds up to being outside your business intent. You miss all of those if your escalations are managed only at the agent level. So each escalation needs to intelligently find and route to the right experts and the right authority. Since every agent or group of agents is different, each escalation requires different context and will require different types of actions that need to be enabled and triggered from that escalation. This means your escalation system needs to automatically adjust intelligently for every escalation from every agent across all of your organization and take actions directly in the same place right there in the escalation. So your team doesn't have to figure out which agent or groups of agents they need to go access and process the action required as a result of the escalation. It has to be efficient, has to all be in one place. Third, your escalation system needs to capture learnings automatically so you can improve. Do you need to update a guardrail, change an agent, build and add a new agent to the workflow? Do you know what questions to ask to improve your system? Did you capture all the context? How does it match your business strategy? What are the requirements for the change? Who needs to sign off? Can you get that change applied? You need a system that includes this change management process. Finally, fourth, you need one place to ask questions. How many times did this type of transaction happen? Which agents participated in the decision? How many times did this agent escalate this week? Who was involved? What decisions did we make when what actions were taken? And who signed off? What did we learn? Did we change anything? Your CFO, your auditor, your board all ask these questions. You need one place to ask them that's inclusive across all of your agents, across your entire business, no matter where they're deployed or run, where you can get that answer in 30 seconds. You can't have to attempt a science project of stitching together audit logs across 10, 20, or more agents and across thousands of transactions. You can't make this difficult for yourself. You need one place to do all this. You need one system that does all of these 4 critical parts. As I said before, we built 4S Equals to do all of this in a single solution across any company, completely agent and system agnostic. I've covered mindset, skill set, and tool set. You need to change all 3. So let me walk you through a simple example of what this looks like at a company that's got all 3 of these right. My example is a delivery business, and they started with one agent on one job figuring out the routes their drivers take each day to make their deliveries. In the first month, that agent brought their fuel costs down by 3%— useful impact. But then the agent started trying something no one had asked it to do. In a few areas where they had a lot of customers close together, it kept trying to schedule deliveries for the same day the order came in. That was outside what their delivery policy allowed. So every time it tried to do this, an approval request was escalated and went to somebody on their team. Now, this is the exact moment where having the right mindset comes into play because a lot of organizations would just take that option away from the agent right there, lock it down, control it, and those requests would stop that afternoon. What this company did was look for the learnings in that escalation, look at what the agent was working off and why it was trying to make a decision to same-day delivery. And that agent turned out to be right because delivering the same day in those areas actually worked. So what did they do? They leaned in and updated the policy. By month 2, they were selling same-day delivery in those zones, and that captured revenue they didn't have before. About month 6, most of their ideas were coming out of escalation signals. Every time an agent got stopped by a rule, somebody was asking whether that rule was still right. The executive team and leadership was leaning into every escalation. Some turned out to be risk— the rule was right to catch. Some were policies that stopped sense long ago, and a few were chances to start selling something new or adding new capabilities, like the same-day delivery one in this example. And by month 9, all of those requests added up. It showed them where the business was actually running differently from the way leadership thought it was. And these requests added up, stacked up, improved every single week a little bit on top of a little bit, and the business got better. And the only reason they could see this pattern is because every one of those those requests was in the same place. Any one of them on their own looks like something small. A larger competitor never saw the same chance to sell same-day delivery in those areas where customers were closest together. The smaller company tuning in to these signals captured a new market and sped past their competitor. Lean in. This is your opportunity. Lean into it. This is not the job for your IT team. This is the job of your business leaders. This is a conversation for your COO, your CFO, and your CIO, your business leaders and functional experts. Your COO should be asking why the scheduling agents keep wanting to work around a labor rule. Your CFO should be asking why procurement agents keep trying to buy from certain vendors and not others. And your CIO should be asking which rules are stopping agents in more than one of your systems at the same time. Your business leaders should be trying to improve business outcomes, not just deploy agents. You only do this if you have a system that does all of this in one place. And that whole system doesn't exist in any organization today. And it's the whole reason I built my platform Force Equals. It connects to the agents you already have, no matter which platform they're running inside. So nothing has to be rebuilt or moved. With that said, let me show you what those 3 questions look like inside this platform. So this is every agent I've got running across my platform and everything they've requested all in one place so I can lean into it straight away. I I can see how many of them need a human involved right now and how urgent each escalation is. So this screen answers the first question about what the agent was seeing when it made the call. I can see the decision it wanted to make, the numbers, the context it was working off, and the rule that stopped it and flagged the escalation all in one screen before I have to decide anything. And this answers the second question about whether any of my other agents are running into the same problem, because right here it's flagged that for the other agents, on 3 different platforms all got stopped by the same rule this week. So nobody would have caught that from the individual request because everyone would have gone to a different person. You wouldn't have visibility if they were— you manage that in separate agents. Lastly, for the 3rd question about what all this says about how the business is actually running, I can just ask across every agent at once. So here I'm asking which agents got stopped by a rule this week and nobody has resolved And who signed off on the rules in the first place? And I can get that answer straight back without anybody having to build a report. By the way, if you want to try Force Equals on your own agents, you can get started for free by clicking the first link below this video. Anyway, let's keep going. Connect all your agents. I built this so it literally takes 2 clicks to connect any of your agents. So it's super easy to start. Instantly, you have control, visibility, intelligent routing, learning, and change management all in one place for all of your agents, whether you have have 3 agents in deployment or 300. Governance is already built into your agents and is immediately adopted. You can augment governance guardrails, control policies and workflow at the agent level for any group of agents and at any higher levels so you can manage and adjust real operations to your business intent. Escalations are ready automatically. The system starts learning about your agents and how to optimize the performance for each of their escalations. It starts learning the context it needs to present to different team members. It learns who needs to be involved for every escalation all automatically. And it gets more efficient every time it interacts with your team. Then treat every escalation in Insight as data, even the ones you end up dismissing. This is your new learning engine. You'll start getting the feel of agent and human interactions and learning at the pace of your agents as you lean into them. And you'll start building the reflexes to know when a request is the rule doing its job And when it's a signal to capture to make a change and add capabilities or update a guardrail, force equals accelerates getting these changes deployed to your team. Then you repeat. It's your new flywheel. It's your new competitive advantage. Manage your agents and make incremental improvements. They add up. They compound your impact and business results. Now the mindset and the skill set are things your team needs to build over time. The tool set is the part you can have. Have running this week. And you can do that by getting started with 4S equals. It's free. I'll leave a link to it at the top of the description. It lets you see every single agent you're running in one place, allows business-level control. You see exactly what the agent was working off, intelligent human-in-the-loop interactions and escalations, what decisions were captured, the insights and learnings, and helps you manage the change that keeps you improving incrementally every day. So again, you can get started with 4S Equals for free by clicking the first link in this video. And if you want Elon Musk's framework for scaling with AI, how to run it on your own agents, then check out this next video.