40% of AI agent projects will be axed

Gartner, the research firm, predicts that over 40% of AI agent projects will be scrapped by the end of 2027.

It gives three reasons: rising costs, weak risk controls and unclear business value. The last one is the one you control. Unclear business value usually means somebody built an agent before anyone decided what its job was.

An AI agent, or AI team member, is AI set up to do one job in your business from start to finish. You'd never hire a person without a job description, and an agent needs one before it starts too.

A good one fits on one page, in six parts.

Start with the job in one sentence. For example: draft a first reply to every new customer enquiry, for a person to check before it goes out.

Then list what it works from. Here that's the enquiry itself and your notes on how you deal with customers.

Say what it hands back, and who gets it. In this case, a draft reply in the shared inbox for whoever is on enquiries that day.

Add the things it must never do, like promise a delivery date or quote a price.

Add when it stops and asks a person, such as a complaint or anything unusual.

Finish with the three or four checks someone runs before anything goes out, like the customer's name being right and the reply answering what they actually asked.

If you can't fill that page, the agent isn't ready to be built, and you've found that out for free.

Once it's written, the instructions for the AI are nearly done, because every line of them comes straight from that page.

This week, write the one-page job description for the first job you'd hand to AI.