The hardest part of putting an agent to work is not the setup. It is picking the first job. Choose something too ambiguous and you will spend more time correcting than you save. Choose one of these five and you will see value in a week.
Start where the work is repetitive and bounded
The best first jobs share a shape: they recur on a known cadence, they have a clear “done,” and a wrong answer is cheap to catch. That is why pipeline hygiene and morning briefings top the list. The agent sweeps, drafts, and stages the result for your approval.
The five
- Pipeline hygiene: find deals gone quiet, research what changed, draft the follow-up.
- Morning briefing: overnight changes across your tools, summarised before you log on.
- Ticket triage: label, route, and draft first responses for the queue.
- Invoice chasing: track what is overdue and prepare the nudge.
- Standup notes: assemble yesterday’s activity into a clean update.
How to brief them
Give the agent the trigger, the source, and the definition of done. Keep the first version read-and-draft, not send-and-act, so you build trust before you widen the leash. Every one of these is a probationary hire that earns more autonomy over time.