What a digital worker should never do alone

Most of the work you hand to a digital worker can, in time, be finished by the worker on its own. A short list of actions never should be. Not because the worker is likely to get them wrong, but because the result carries consequences that someone in your company should own by name.

This note covers where KAgents draws that line, why we draw it there, and how to write the list for your own team.

The test is consequence, not difficulty

It is tempting to sort tasks by how hard they look. That is the wrong axis. Writing a SQL query that joins five tables is hard. It is also exactly the kind of work Luke, our data worker, takes on, with the query shown next to every answer so anyone can check it. Approving a refund, on the other hand, takes a moment.

The better question is this: if it goes wrong, who answers for it? If the honest answer is a specific person, such as your controller, a hiring manager or the rep who owns the account, the action waits for that person. The worker can do everything around it. It can gather the documents, check the numbers, draft the message and explain what it found. The decision itself stays with a person.

Moving money

Money is the clearest case. Hannah, the finance worker, matches invoices, chases overdue payments and reconciles accounts. It never releases a payment. Every payment run waits for a named approver, and that rule can't be switched to autopilot.

The same applies in support. Caleb, the support worker, can answer billing questions and pull up the order history. Refunds, credits and account changes above your limit still wait for a named approver. Below the limit you set, the rules you wrote apply. Above it, someone on your team decides.

The reasoning is simple. Money is hard to recall once it has left. And keeping the person who prepares a payment separate from the person who approves it is a basic finance control. A digital worker should make that control easier to keep, not quietly remove it.

Decisions about people

Spencer, the HR worker, takes on the coordination side of hiring: screening applications against your criteria, scheduling interviews, chasing feedback and preparing paperwork. It never makes a hiring decision. A person decides who moves forward and who gets an offer.

Spencer applies the same criteria to every applicant and records the reason behind each note. The people deciding can see how the shortlist was built, and question it. That record matters. A hiring decision shapes someone's working life, and the people affected deserve to know that a person made the call.

Commitments made in your name

Some actions commit your company to something: a discount, a contract term, a delivery date or a statement of policy. Once a customer or a partner has it in writing, it is hard to take back.

Vanessa, the sales worker, never discusses pricing, discounts or contract terms. Those go straight to a rep. Caleb answers only from approved sources, such as your help center and policies, and says so plainly when it doesn't know. Neither one improvises a commitment, because a commitment needs an owner.

Emails to new contacts belong here too. A first message to someone who has never heard from you speaks for your company. You can mark it as sensitive, so a person reads and approves it before it goes out.

Conversations that need a person

Some cases are not about rules at all. An angry customer, a legal threat or a safety concern needs a person, not a well-written reply. Caleb hands these conversations to a human right away, with a summary of what has been said so far, so nobody has to explain twice.

The same principle applies on every desk. When a case is unclear, out of policy or emotionally charged, the worker stops and hands it to a person instead of guessing.

Writing your own list

Our defaults are a starting point. Your list should come from how your business already works. Five steps help:

1. Start from your approval policy. Whatever needs a signature today, such as a purchase above a limit or a change to a contract, still needs one when a worker prepares it.
2. Add anything that speaks for you outside the company. Offers, credits, new terms and first contact with new people.
3. Name the approver. A role and a person, not "someone in finance". An approval queue nobody owns is not an approval.
4. Mark the action as sensitive in the worker's rules. It then waits for that person, whatever mode the rest of the task runs in.
5. Check the record. The audit trail should show what the worker prepared, which rule applied and who signed off.

If you're working out which actions on your team should always wait for a person, bring your approval policy to a demo. We'll go through it with you and show where each line sits for a KAgents worker.