You get to know an agent by giving it a real task

You get to know an agent by giving it a real task.

Not with a demo, not with an explanation of what it could do. You give it a task, watch what it does, and only then do you know whether you trust it.

That is how my book From Zero to AI Agents That Do The Work is built. It does not start with the technology, but with work you already know: an email that needs an answer, an invoice that needs checking, an appointment that needs scheduling.

Every chapter has an assignment you can do the same evening, on a sample administration. Nothing can go wrong there, so you are free to make mistakes and see what happens. What you see, you take back to your own work.

What you will find in the book:

• 27 chapters, spread over five parts;
• an assignment for the same evening with every chapter;
• written for anyone who wants the work to get done, even without programming experience;
• not only what worked, but also what went wrong and what it cost.

It is meant for an entrepreneur, a manager or an employee who wants to hand something over to an agent and wants to know how to do that carefully. You start small, with one task. You learn what to check, what to let go and where you keep the last word.

That last point matters most to me. An agent that does the work does not take over the responsibility. That stays with you, and the book shows how to set that up without it becoming an extra job.

That is why the first real assignment comes early in the book. You notice right away where you had not yet thought about what the agent needs: an example, a boundary, an end point where it may stop. That is exactly what you want to know for your own work, and it is cheapest to learn on a sample administration.

Every chapter after that builds on it. First one task, then several tasks side by side, then an agent that knows when to stop and ask, and finally an organisation of agents with a goal, a budget and a memory. You walk through the steps at your own pace, one evening per chapter.

The book is available in Dutch and in English, as a paperback and as an ebook. The English book is also available as an audiobook.

More about the book: florisknol.com/books/ai-agents-that-do-the-work/

Which task would you give an agent first, if you knew nothing could go wrong?

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