Hiring an agent: what you do with it and what it delivers
Most organisations have work that isn't difficult, but keeps coming back. Sorting and categorising invoices. Answering standard customer questions. Keeping track of a campaign and reporting on how it's going. Writing down a process so a new colleague can follow it. It takes no deep thinking, but it does take time, week after week.
That is the kind of work you hire an agent for in the Stilops customer portal.
What an agent is for you
An agent is not a chatbot that answers one-off questions. It is a role you take on from a template catalogue (Secretary, Administrative Assistant, Bookkeeping Support, Tax Return Assistant, Campaign Analyst, Content & Social, Customer Service, Process Documentation), each with a fixed monthly price and a fixed number of tasks included. You hire it, and from that moment you can give it tasks within that field: the same kind of work you do yourself or delegate to someone now, but with a steady rhythm and a fixed place where you can see the results.
You don't approve an intention, you approve an outcome
Having an agent's plan approved in advance doesn't solve the real problem: a plan can look good and still turn out wrong. That's why at Stilops you don't see an announcement, but the result itself, before it counts.
Every task with real impact goes through the same fixed mechanism:
- Proposal: the agent explains what it wants to do, before anything happens.
- Test run: the same steps actually run, in your environment, and you see the real result: amounts, recipients, quantities, exactly as they would land, without anything being recorded or sent yet.
- Approval: only once you have seen that result and agree is it actually carried out.
If you ask Bookkeeping Support to categorise a stack of invoices, the test run shows you exactly which category each invoice gets: not a promise that it will be fine, but the outcome itself, for you to check. If you reject the test run, nothing has happened, and it doesn't cost you anything from your quota either.
This costs us something, on purpose
Some systems make approval lighter the longer they've run without errors: routine tasks then go through on their own after a while. Not at Stilops. The approval step never disappears and never becomes automatic, not even after a hundred runs of the same task. That is slower than it could be, and precisely why it can be trusted: there is no moment at which the system decides for itself that it has gone well for long enough.
What it delivers
Mainly time and predictability. Work that now gets stuck somewhere between your other tasks gets a fixed executor, a fixed moment at which you review it, and a fixed monthly price with tasks included. You only choose to go beyond that yourself, if you decide to.
It isn't a promise that every task delivers exactly what you had in mind. That depends on what you ask and how clearly you put it, just as with a colleague. It is a promise that you never have to rely on an intention to get there: you always see the outcome before it counts.
Curious which role fits your organisation? The catalogue in the customer portal shows, for each type of organisation, which agents are used most for it.