View slides (PDF) Agentic workflows for business operations
Presented to the Apex Intelligence Connections Circle, this session examined how AI agents can work across business applications: gathering evidence, coordinating tasks, and preparing work for human review.
The focus was the operating model behind that work. What can an agent access? How should a task be divided? What context does each agent need, and where should a person remain involved?
The architecture behind useful agents
- Tools and permissions: defining the actions an agent can take and the systems it is allowed to access.
- Connectors and MCP: connecting agents to business applications with explicit access scopes.
- Reusable skills: capturing a repeatable process, including the instructions and output requirements that make its results useful.
- Specialist agents and context: dividing a workflow into focused tasks, then bringing their findings together without losing the evidence behind them.
The session also examined where Claude Cowork and Claude Code fit: document and application workflows on one side, software engineering on the other.
A live orchestration workflow
My morning time-reconciliation workflow provided the demonstration. Specialist agents gathered activity from several work systems. A reusable skill reconciled that evidence against projects and tasks, paused for calendar input, and prepared time entries.
The walkthrough made the coordination visible: parallel information gathering, focused context, reconciliation across sources, and an explicit point for human input. It showed how an agentic workflow is assembled from responsibilities and connections that can be inspected.
Adoption with clear boundaries
The discussion connected that model to status reporting, meeting preparation, and document production. Choosing a bounded workflow, limiting access, and reviewing the result gives a team a concrete basis for deciding where agentic tools belong in its operations.
The material can be adapted for a business leadership session or a team workshop on designing and adopting agentic workflows.
The PDF below preserves the original presentation title, “AI Agents for the Rest of Us.”