Learning goals
- You can tell assistant, workflow and agent apart.
- You assess the state of agent adoption realistically.
- You write an agent profile with guardrails.
Assistant, workflow, agent
| Assistant | Workflow | Agent | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who decides the steps? | A person | Fixed in advance | The AI |
| Example | Email draft | Invoice into the ERP | Prepare a client meeting from CRM, email and website |
| Risk | low | medium | high |
An agent gets a goal and tools. It plans which steps are needed and carries them out. That only pays off when the steps truly depend on the case. Many tasks that start as agent projects are better solved with a fixed workflow.
Where agents stand in 2026
In McKinsey's August 2026 survey, 40 % of respondents from large companies with more than one billion US dollars in revenue say their organisation is scaling AI agents, up from 27 % a year earlier. Among smaller organisations the figure is flat at 22 %. Microsoft reports 15-fold growth in active agents in Microsoft 365 on its own platform. The Stanford AI Index 2026, by contrast, shows agent deployment still in the single digits in almost every business function.
The picture: steep growth from a small base. Large companies and software teams are furthest ahead.
Guardrails
Agents act. That is why they need rules before they start:
- Least privilege: Only the tools and data needed for the goal. Read-only at first.
- Confirmation: Sending emails, deleting data and triggering payments only after human approval.
- Logging: Every step is logged.
- Stop criteria: When does the agent hand over to a person?
- Cost limit: Many agents are billed by usage.
One particular risk is prompt injection: if an agent reads web pages or emails, it can follow instructions hidden in them. Do not give it rights an attacker could abuse.
The agent profile
Describe an agent before you build it.
Do the task in your day-to-day work
You do this task in your day-to-day work, not here in the course. Tick off the steps once you have done them.
What comes out of it: A profile you can use to request a pilot.
Enter your result here
Enter what came out of the task. Everything is saved automatically. Your results from module 3 are already waiting here.
See an example
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Your agent profile
- Goal in one sentence
- Compare supplier quotes and prepare a recommendation with reasons
- Would a fixed workflow be simpler?
- no
- Reason
- Quotes arrive in different formats and the criteria change with each purchase
- Allowed tools
- Read access to the quotes folder, supplier master data, spreadsheet
- Forbidden actions
- Place orders, contact suppliers, negotiate prices
- Stop criteria
- Required details missing, more than 10 per cent over budget, running longer than 15 minutes
- Responsible person
- Head of purchasing
- Cost limit per month in euros
- 50
From module 3 Your top 3 open
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Kept in your workbook
No later module needs this result. It stays in the workbook, where you can export it.
Quiz
1. When is an agent worth it instead of a fixed workflow?
2. According to McKinsey 2026, how many respondents from large companies say their organisation is scaling AI agents?
3. What is prompt injection?
4. Which action should an agent take only after human confirmation?