AI Agents at Work: 7 Workplace Processes Ripe for Agentic Automation

When people first encounter the idea of AI agents, the obvious question is: What could this actually do in my organisation? The good news is that you do not need to invent exotic use cases. Many everyday processes are already ideal candidates for agentic automation, delivering quick wins without a major transformation programme.

Below are seven concrete examples you can use as inspiration when you start mapping agentic workflows in your own workplace.

1. Service request triage

Most service desks and internal ticketing queues are clogged with routine requests. An agentic workflow can sit at the front door, reading each request, classifying it, and deciding what should happen next.

A well-designed agent can:

• Recognise intent from free-text descriptions and attachments.
• Check knowledge bases and past tickets for similar issues.
• Provide an immediate answer where possible, or collect missing information.
• Route the ticket to the right resolver group with the relevant context.

Humans still handle complex or sensitive issues, but the volume of trivial or misrouted tickets drops dramatically.

2. Customer e-mail handling

Shared inboxes for sales, support or operations teams are another rich vein of candidate work. Instead of manually parsing each message, an agent can manage the flow:

• Categorising messages (for example, billing question, new enquiry, complaint).
• Drafting responses using your tone of voice and policies.
• Flagging urgent or high-risk items for rapid human review.
• Logging key details back into your CRM or helpdesk.

The result is faster response times, more consistent communication and fewer opportunities for something important to slip through the net.

3. Lead research and enrichment

Go-to-market teams spend an enormous amount of time looking up companies and contacts, filling in missing details and deciding whether a lead is worth pursuing. An agentic workflow can automate much of this groundwork.

Agents can pull information from trusted sources, summarise it for humans, suggest an initial route (for example, outbound, nurture, park) and keep records up to date. People then spend their time on genuine sales conversations rather than tedious data entry.

4. Document drafting and review

From policy updates to project status reports, organisations are fuelled by documents. Agentic workflows can take you beyond simple “write me a draft” interactions by managing the entire drafting and review cycle:

• Creating first drafts based on templates and source data.
• Circulating documents to the right stakeholders.
• Incorporating feedback while maintaining structure and tone.
• Tracking approvals and publishing the final version.

This frees knowledge workers to focus on the substance of what they are saying instead of wrestling with formatting and chasing signatures.

5. Onboarding and offboarding

Bringing people or customers into (and out of) your organisation involves many steps across HR, IT, finance, security and more. It is easy for tasks to be missed or duplicated.

Agentic workflows can orchestrate these journeys end-to-end, ensuring that:

• Checklists are generated and tailored to the individual.
• Systems access is requested and verified.
• Welcome communications are sent at the right moments.
• Progress is visible to stakeholders and bottlenecks are flagged early.

The same pattern works for offboarding, where compliance and risk concerns are particularly high.

6. Financial and compliance checks

While the most sensitive decisions will always involve humans, agents can play a powerful supporting role in repetitive due diligence and compliance workflows.

For example, an agent might:

• Gather information required for a Know Your Customer (KYC) check.
• Run basic validations and flag missing items.
• Cross-check data between internal systems.
• Generate a structured summary for a compliance officer to review.

This speeds up decision-making while improving traceability.

7. Meeting follow-up and action tracking

Meetings generate promises, actions and notes - and then everyone rushes off to the next call. Agentic workflows can close this gap by listening to meeting transcripts or notes, extracting actions and driving follow-through.

A typical workflow could:

• Summarise the meeting in a structured format.
• Identify actions, owners and deadlines.
• Log them in your chosen task or project tool.
• Send gentle nudges and status requests until items are closed.
• Provide periodic roll-ups of progress for the team.

Picking your first candidate

Not every process is ready for agentic automation on day one. When choosing where to begin, look for workflows that are:

• High volume and moderately standardised.
• Tiring or frustrating for the people currently doing them.
• Low to medium risk, with clear escalation paths.
• Supported by reasonably clean data and systems.

Start small, learn quickly and expand from there. You will soon discover that once agents prove their worth in one area, colleagues across the organisation will start bringing you new ideas of where they could help next.