The best first agent isn’t the most impressive one. It’s the one that will be live in two weeks and obviously useful in four.

Look for four things

• High volume: at least a few hundred cases a week

• A written policy, even an imperfect one

• Reversible actions, or a natural approval point

• An outcome you already measure

Avoid these, at first

Workflows that depend on judgement nobody has written down, actions you can’t undo and processes that span five teams. They’re all possible later — just not first.

Good first candidates

Ticket triage, refund requests under a threshold, lead enrichment, invoice matching and access requests. Each has a template in Cairn you can run in shadow mode today.