Your first enterprise agent should be recommend-only

Write-back is where the risk is, and it is also where most of the value isn't. Start with an agent that tells people what to look at.

Every agent conversation with an enterprise eventually reaches the moment where someone says "and then it creates the purchase order." That is the moment to stop and ask whether the agent needs to.

In the supply-chain work we have shipped this year, our agents recommend. The shortage agent ranks which shortages matter today; the supplier-messaging agent drafts the supplier email. A human creates the PO, a human clicks send. Nobody on the business side has asked for that to change, and the security review was a fraction of what a write-back agent would have needed.

Why recommend-only wins early

  • The value is in the ranking, not the action. A planner who knows which twelve of two thousand shortages matter today has most of what they wanted. The PO takes them ninety seconds.
  • Trust is built on reversible decisions. If the agent is wrong about a shortage, the planner ignores it and tells you. If the agent is wrong about a PO, you have a supplier problem.
  • Your change-advisory board can approve it. A read-only agent with a documented back-out plan is a routine change. A system that writes into SAP is not.
  • The data path is simpler. The runtime needs one credential to a toolbox that reads views. No write scopes, no idempotency design, no reconciliation job.

What "recommend-only" needs to actually mean

It is not enough to say the agent doesn't write. The agent should also not recompute. If SAP already carries a running balance, read it; do not sum the elements again and hope you land on the same number. When the two disagree, the system of record wins, and the disagreement is a defect to fix, not a feature to explain.

Stamp every row with the date the data was extracted. "You are short 4,200 units" is a different sentence from "as of Tuesday's extract, you were short 4,200 units", and only the second one survives a planner checking it against the screen on Wednesday.

When to move on

Add an action when the pilot users are asking for it and the action is small, logged, and reversible — creating a draft email in the buyer's own mailbox, for instance, rather than sending it. Draft-first is a good second step because the human click is still the approval gate.

All insights

Talk to us

Tell us what system the answer lives in and who needs it. We'll reply with a view on whether it's a two-week assessment, a five-week pilot, or something else.

akash@insightnext.tech

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