Procedure automation
A twelve-step procedure only one person knew now runs automatically—from chat, a schedule, email, or a spreadsheet cell—with every step logged and attributable.
- Before
A twelve-step standard operating procedure in a Word doc. One person knows it. When she is out, it does not happen.
- What we did
Pasted the SOP into an Agent Operating Procedure (AOP). Named the tools it may use, the policy it must follow, the trigger that starts it, and the shape of the output. Attached the data sources.
- After
The procedure runs on demand or on a schedule. Every run logged. Every step attributable. A human approves the steps you mark before the procedure continues.
Time to live: about two weeks with a forward-deployed engineer. The first run exposes every ambiguity in the SOP. That is expected, and it improves the procedure.
An Agent Operating Procedure (AOP) is the instruction set for a workflow: tools, policy, triggers, and output shape.
From a Word doc SOP to a logged, attributable Agent Operating Procedure
“Gave Athena the spreadsheet, explained which column I was trying to figure out, and then ten secs it told me... exactly how the calculation was based on the other data.”
“One workspace. All different, let's say, avatars of their output data. Right? Suddenly, it's dashboard. Excel is here. PowerPoint is when it's all together. It's very impressive.”
“I'm very excited. This is something that I have been piecemealing with the limited tools that analysts get... rather than me at nine PM getting a failure email and deciding I'll just do it myself.”
“It's good to understand the capability of the platform. That how far, and how quickly you guys can get these things going [...] that has been impressive overall.”
“Lets us get a lot more out of our data than [...] We can sit on top of all of the data in [our data warehouse] as opposed to just, like, our little ingested, you know, three gigabytes semantic models. I think we have a lot of power here.”
“He wrote the entire stuff. By itself. And I was there, and I was thinking, alright. If I had to write all this stuff, I mean, I would've spent days, days, days.”
“I send that to the programmer and he said, alright. I read your file. I copied the section of the code because he has the right interface, and it works. Wow. Just like magic.”
“Use the Athena platform probably closer to the concept and how it was designed, like, with the spaces architecture where you've got a set of primitives and capabilities, and you bring together the right set of capabilities to solve a task.”
“Digital worker, it gets spun up, it gets given access to the toolkits that it needs. It gets given access to the data that it needs. Just exists for the period it needs to exist to perform the task. And then it gets torn back down again afterwards.”
“I like that direction, that concept of the agent is the agent. It becomes an entity in its own right with its own ownership and its own missioning, and you get rid of the gray area and the blurry lines.”
Verbatim from customer calls. Customers anonymized.
Related products and stories
Run this on a schedule
Start from a ready-made procedure that runs on a schedule.
See this on your own work
Bring one recurring task, a sample input, and an example of work you would accept.