An AI Agent Amplifies Your Process — the Good and the Bad

There's a truth we forget the moment we talk about AI agents, and yet it should come first. An agent doesn't think for you about how to do the work: it executes the way of working you give it, faster and without tiring. If that way of working is good, it amplifies it. If it's shaky, it amplifies the flaws too. An agent is a multiplier, and a multiplier works in both directions.

It's the direct extension of a rule we discussed last week, the famous "70%": the value of an AI project comes far more from people and processes than from the tool. Agents don't contradict that rule, they sharpen it. As long as AI merely answered, a fuzzy process stayed an inconvenience. The moment an agent acts on that process, the fuzziness becomes a source of repeated errors, executed at high speed.

Take a simple example. A company handles its supplier invoices with an improvised process: everyone files their own way, exceptions are settled from memory, nothing is written down. Handing that to an agent won't fix the mess — it will automate it. The agent will faithfully apply inconsistent rules, and produce errors consistent with a process that had none. You'll have replaced a slow mess with a fast one.

Conversely, a company that took the time to clarify that same process — which documents, in what order, what to do with special cases — gives the agent solid ground. There, automation delivers on its promise: repetitive work disappears, people focus on the exceptions that require judgment, and speed becomes an advantage rather than a risk. The difference between the two companies isn't the agent. It's the process they handed it.

For an owner, the practical consequence is reassuring: the most valuable work happens before the agent, and it isn't expensive. Honestly describing how a task is done today, spotting the inconsistencies, deciding how to handle edge cases — that's time, not a big budget. And it's what decides whether the agent makes you money or multiplies your headaches.

At Paquin & Co., we clean up the process before handing it to an agent — because automating disorder just means hitting the wall faster. paquinco.com