Operational work run by agents, under guardrails you set.
Deployments, credential rotation, environment cleanup, routine checks: operational work that repeats. Carried out by agents with access only to actions on an approved list; every run is logged; at defined points control passes to a human.
The problem it solves
Operations accumulates work that is too repetitive to do by hand and too consequential to hand to whoever is free: the same deployment steps, credential rotation, cleanup of environments nobody switched off. It is automatable in principle and rarely automated in practice, because a script that handles the standard path reliably behaves incorrectly on the exception. The boundary that matters is not whether it can run without a human, but which actions the agent may take autonomously and at which points it must stop and ask for confirmation. The scope here is infrastructure operations rather than business processes: the ground this company already works on.
What it covers
- Analysis of which operations actually repeat
- A library of runbooks the agent executes
- An explicit allowlist of permitted actions
- Confirmation points where a human decides
- Defined behaviour when the situation is ambiguous
- A log of every run: inputs, steps and result
- Human review before anything ships
- A verified path back to the previous state
- Handover: your team adds runbooks independently
You get
A set of operations that run without manual entry, a log of every run, and a switch back to manual at any moment.
Typically SaaS and e-commerce platform teams, where deployment and cleanup repeat across environments often enough to be worth writing into a runbook.
Book an architecture review →An agent with an unbounded action list is not an automation but a potential incident. Three conditions make it safe against production: a narrow allowlist of permitted actions, mandatory stopping points that require confirmation, and logging of every run that can be reviewed afterwards.