How to Build Your First AI Agent Workflow

1. Pick a task you already do the same way every time

Good first tasks have a clear trigger and a clear finish: a form submission that needs a reply, a new file that needs filing, a weekly report that needs the same five numbers. If you cannot write the steps down in under ten lines, it is not your first agent.

2. Write the manual version first

Do the task by hand three times and write down each step, each tool you opened and each decision you made. The decisions are the part the AI will handle; everything else is plain automation.

3. Split it into fixed steps and judgment steps

• Fixed steps (move data, send to a sheet, create a draft) go in your automation tool — n8n, Make or Zapier.
• Judgment steps (classify, summarise, write a reply) go to the model, with a tightly written prompt.
• Keep the model’s job small: one decision per call is easier to test than five.

4. Start in draft mode

For the first week the agent should prepare, not send. Drafts in a folder, rows marked “ready for review”, messages queued instead of delivered. You learn where it goes wrong without any of those mistakes reaching a customer.

5. Log every run

One spreadsheet row per run is enough: time, input, what the model decided, what was done, and whether you approved it. After twenty runs the log tells you which steps you can trust and which need a better prompt or a human check.

6. Remove the human check one step at a time

When a step has been right every time for a week or two, let it run on its own. Keep the check on anything that spends money, contacts a customer or deletes something.