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March 18, 2026 · 6 min read

How to use AI agents in service operations

The question is not whether agents can answer. It is which decisions you are willing to delegate, and what evidence you require before trusting the answer. Treat agents as staff with narrow mandates, not as a general intelligence.

Delegate routing, supervise judgement

Agents are excellent at classification, briefing and recovery, because those tasks have clear success criteria. Pricing, positioning and hiring remain human decisions that agents should inform with evidence rather than resolve.

Give every agent one job

A support agent that also drafts campaigns does both badly. Narrow mandates produce better outputs and simpler audit trails, and they make it obvious when a mandate should be expanded.

Measure finished work

Track deliverables completed, refunds issued and time to first output. Message counts flatter adoption; finished work is the only metric that survives a budget review.

Put this into practice

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