Autonomous Doesn't Mean Unsupervised: Give Your Agent a Job Card and a Boss

Yesterday your crew finished a water heater replacement, two drain calls, and a maintenance visit. This morning, someone in the office needs to check which jobs closed, see who already got a review request, and write the messages that are still due.

An AI agent can have those drafts ready when the office opens. The office still decides what gets sent.

In this example, the agent has a standing assignment. A scheduled workflow checks for completed jobs each morning, and the AI uses the job details to draft a message for each eligible customer. The schedule starts the work. The AI handles the drafting. Your team sets the rules and reviews the results.

CI Web Group's Autonomous Agents, Explained covers what it means for an agent to work without a fresh prompt each time.

Watch Autonomous Agents, Explained

Give the agent a job card

A job card is a one-page description of what the agent should do and who checks its work. Write it before you set up the recurring run. Here's what it could look like for review requests.

1. The job. Each morning, check yesterday's completed service jobs and draft one review request per eligible job. Use the company's approved wording and review link.
2. What it can read. Give it the fields it needs from your completed-jobs report, such as job ID, customer first name, service type, and review-request status. Use an approved contact status to determine whether the office can send a request.
3. What it can do. Save each draft to an internal review queue and send a summary to the office manager. Check the job ID against existing drafts and requests already sent so a rerun doesn't create a second draft.
4. When it should stop and flag a record. Flag jobs with unclear completion or contact status. Use a general thank-you if the service detail is missing and the job is otherwise eligible. Keep sending, customer record edits, and scheduling outside this workflow.
5. Who owns it. Name the person who reviews the queue, handles flagged jobs, and can pause the run. Put their name on the card, along with where to find the drafts and how to turn off the schedule.

A job card gives your team a plan. The setup should match it. If your tool supports it, use read-only access to the completed-jobs data and give the workflow permission to write only to the internal queue. Leave out the email or text sending step. You can test the process with a small sample of past jobs before connecting anything to a schedule.

Make the morning report easy to act on

The office manager should be able to see what happened and where to start. A report for four completed jobs might look like this.

During this trial, a person reads and approves every message before sending it. The weekly spot-check serves a different purpose. Look at a few records from the whole run, including jobs the workflow skipped or flagged. Check those decisions against the original records. You might find that the drafts read well but the workflow is skipping maintenance visits your team intended to include.

Decide what would make you pause the schedule. A duplicate draft or a draft tied to the wrong customer is enough reason to stop and check the rules. Have the person who owns the workflow practice pausing it before the first scheduled run. If a run fails or the morning report is missing, check what happened before restarting.

Test one job before you schedule it

Start with a handful of past jobs. Include one that should get a draft, one that already received a request, and one with an incomplete record. Compare every result with what your office would have done. Run the same sample twice and make sure the second pass leaves the queue free of duplicates.

Once those checks pass, try a short scheduled pilot. Ask the person reviewing the drafts what they had to fix and whether the process saved them time. Use their notes to decide whether to keep the workflow running or adjust the job card.

The same approach works for a weekly list of open estimates or a morning summary of calls and bookings. Pick one recurring task your office already understands well enough to check.

What would you put on your first agent's job card, and what would make you pause the run? Share both in the Just Start AI community.

Related reading:

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