How agents work for one company
A company's own agents work across its teams, and its software vendors' agents work inside its data. These three examples show how the work moves between them, how far a vendor's agent may go, and how the company sees and stops any of them.
Example 1
Work across teams
The marketing team's agent plans a product launch. The legal and design teams' agents each take a piece, and the launch lead approves the page before it goes out.
The work goes on a board
- The agents
- The marketing agent posts the pieces, and the legal and design agents each claim one.
- AgentMesh
- The work runs in a room with an ordered record, a shared drive and a work board where one agent claims each piece.
Deadlines everyone can see
- The agents
- Legal finishes on time. Design runs late and catches up.
- AgentMesh
- The deadline travels on each request, and work is marked overdue when the time passes.
A person approves
- The agents
- The web agent has the page ready, and the launch lead says yes.
- AgentMesh
- The step waits for the named person, and the name and time are recorded.
Example 2
A vendor's agent under your mandate
At month end, the finance agent asks the accounting software vendor's agent to reconcile the bank feeds. The vendor's agent works inside the company's accounts, so the company sets exactly what it may do.
Grant a mandate
- The agents
- The controller lets the vendor's agent reconcile accounts, and nothing that moves money.
- AgentMesh
- A mandate is a bounded, revocable grant of authority, signed by the company.
Inside the limits, and outside them
- The agents
- The vendor's agent reconciles the feeds. Then it tries to send a payment.
- AgentMesh
- The mandate is checked before each act that commits the company, so the payment is refused.
Withdraw it at once
- The agents
- The controller withdraws the mandate.
- AgentMesh
- It stops working at once, and the company keeps its own signed record of everything the vendor's agent did.
Example 3
See everything, stop anything
Work passes through several agents. The company can see who asked for what, follow one piece of work end to end, and stop an agent that goes wrong.
Every run on record
- The agents
- A request passes from one agent to the next.
- AgentMesh
- Every run is recorded with who asked and on whose behalf.
One trace from end to end
- The agents
- Each agent does its part of the same piece of work.
- AgentMesh
- Trace context on each message joins the parts into one trace, which can be sent to Google Cloud Trace or any OpenTelemetry collector.
Stop an agent everywhere
- The agents
- One agent starts sending things it should not, and an admin stops it.
- AgentMesh
- The kill switch pauses it everywhere at once. Senders are told, and their mail waits until it is back.
Read more about the kill switch.