A simple guide to picking your first AI agent project.
Thirty minutes with me to identify a strong first agent for your business. No pitch, no sign-up.
An AI agent can take on work that today consumes weeks of skilled time across your firm. Drafting documents. Running multi-step business processes end to end. Managing internal workflows like supplier negotiations, claims intake, or credit-memo drafting.
AI agents are different from traditional software. They make judgements. They take actions. They use data drawn from across your business. That brings genuine complexity, and means an agent needs thoughtful design, deliberate controls, and clear ownership to run reliably.
Not every potential project is the right one to start with. The first AI agent your firm builds matters more than the second or the third. Get the first one wrong and the next ones are harder to get approved.
A well-chosen first project ships, delivers value, and builds your firm's confidence with AI agents. A poorly-chosen one stalls, consumes time and budget without producing a usable result, and makes the next project harder to get approved.
This guide helps you choose well. It walks you through a small set of questions about a project you have in mind, surfaces what it would actually involve, and gives a clear view of whether it is a strong first choice.
A 15-page guide. Clear direction. No fluff.
Surface the work, the value, the risks, and what would happen if something went wrong.
Classify your project against four levels. The level tells you what controls, oversight, and ownership the agent needs.
A clear view of the project's value, what it would commit your firm to, and whether it is your strongest first AI agent project to start with. A worked example in the guide walks through how this looks for two candidate projects at the same firm.
The playbook draws on Bounded Agency, the architecture Serpin developed for designing AI agents that are reliable, secure, and deliver real value.
It combines research into what makes production agents work with our own experience building and deploying agents for ourselves and our clients.