Shipping your first agent
You have read enough to know an agent should own a process, not answer questions. Now the real work starts: deciding which process, and what "done" means.
The first agent is never a technology decision. It is a scope decision. The teams that get a working agent in week two all picked a process that was already annoying, already manual, and already had a person who understood it well enough to say when the output was wrong.
Pick something like support triage, weekly reporting, or lead qualification. Not "customer success" — that is a department, not a process. The narrower the better, because the first agent is mostly an exercise in discovering what you did not know about your own process.
Decide what the agent is not allowed to do
Before any code, write down the actions that need a human. Sending money, changing production, emailing a customer, writing to a contract. Those are not the things you automate first, and pretending otherwise is how you end up explaining an incident.
Everything outside that list is a candidate. Usually the answer is that the agent drafts, routes and follows up — and a person approves the small set of actions that cannot be undone. That boundary is also what makes the thing safe to let run at 2am on a Sunday, which is when you actually get the value.
Automate the glue before you automate the thinking
The most common first mistake is starting with the interesting part. Start with the boring part: the routing, the retries, the logging between the tools you already pay for.
This is unglamorous and it is where the reliability lives. A workflow that retries twice, logs both attempts and never double-charges a card is worth more than a clever prompt that occasionally does the wrong thing. Get the plumbing boring first, then let the model be interesting on top of it.
Give it an interface people can correct
An agent nobody can inspect is an agent nobody will trust. The interface is not decoration — it is how a human catches a wrong answer before it becomes an incident, and how you collect the corrections that make next week better.
Show what it decided, what it used, and what it is about to do. Let a person approve, reject or amend in one click, and record that correction. After a month of this you have a dataset of real mistakes, which is worth more than any evaluation set you could write by hand.
What this usually costs
A first scoped agent starts at $499 and the workflow glue around it at $899. Both are fixed scope with the price on the page before anyone talks to you. If your process does not fit either of those shapes we will say so rather than quote you a number that does not survive contact with your actual stack.