Measure the current work.
Record a representative week: volume, hands-on minutes, common errors and exceptions. Do not turn a quick questionnaire into a claim of audited savings.
Start small.
Prove the work.
A complete workflow has an owner, an input, a trusted source and an outcome you can check.
Agree the boundary.
Choose one result, one source of truth and a clear approval model. Define what the agent may read, propose or change and what happens when it cannot proceed.
Test on a sample.
Use anonymised examples, including malformed inputs, denied access, timeouts, retries and duplicate events. A successful happy-path demo is not enough.
Validate and hand over.
Compare quality, time, escalation volume and cost. Assign the operational owner, document the stop procedure and expand only after acceptance.