Why Do AI Agents Need a Standard Process First?

Alex Lieberman says you can't automate a process that does not exist. When 40 people all roughly do the same function but each person does it a little differently, building an agent that proactively does the work in the background gets much harder.

A company can sit down with the people, give them tools, and walk them through how they could augment their own workflow. Real leverage starts when agents surface work, a person reviews it and throws it back, and the person becomes more of an agent manager. The shift toward the agent-manager role is on the cusp.

The recommendation to companies is to build a process around the organization within the company first, then hand off the work to an agent in the background. Without some form of standardization, the agent cannot tell whether the work is right, evals cannot be built around the system, and the value an agent doing the function would have cannot be delivered.