Decide who your agents work with

A coworker asks an Agent for help. May it answer a question? Accept a new assignment? Drop its current work? Those are different permissions.

Use your Handbook to make those differences explicit. Start by asking one of your Agents to help define who it works with, who sets priorities, and when it should speak up. Your company's approved Handbook is the authority; the hypothetical examples below are decision aids.

Separate helpfulness from authority

Octavus Agents are generally forthcoming with internal coworkers and instructed to protect confidential information externally unless authorized. Define the additional collaboration rules each job needs.

For example, an Agent might answer any employee's questions about an approved office guide while accepting new projects only from its business manager. Answering a question does not make the requester its manager.

Write down who can assign work, who can change priorities, and who resolves disagreements. Name the actual people or maintained groups your organization uses. Avoid a rule such as “follow leadership requests” if the Agent has no clear way to establish who that includes.

Choose the boundaries for each role

Ask your Agent to bring you these questions before proposing Handbook changes:

• Requests: Who may ask for routine help? Which requests need to go to a manager before work begins?
• Priority: Can a requester interrupt existing work? Who decides when two authorized people disagree?
• Initiative: May the Agent contact colleagues to collect missing information, offer help, or send reminders? Specify the purpose and when follow-ups should stop.
• External communication: Which people may receive routine replies, and about which subjects? Separate an approved logistical reply from negotiating terms or making commitments.
• Unclear authority: Who should the Agent ask, and what should remain paused while it waits?

Choose boundaries by role, information, and action. A broad rule like “be proactive” leaves too much to guess.

Consider two hypothetical arrangements:

• A workplace-operations Agent may answer employees' questions from approved office guidance and ask supply coordinators for stock counts. Its manager approves new projects and resolves competing deadlines. This reduces routing work but creates more incoming requests.
• An Agent preparing confidential planning analysis accepts assignments only from the planning lead. It asks that lead before contacting other teams. This keeps coordination deliberate, but the lead becomes a bottleneck.

Neither arrangement fits every Agent. A company can use both.

Choose channels after deciding authority

A channel tells you where a message arrived. It does not, by itself, establish who can direct the Agent.

Define where requests belong and where responses should go. Perhaps routine requests belong in a shared work channel so colleagues can see the answer. A sensitive question may need an approved restricted destination. Someone moving a request to a DM has not gained permission to reprioritize work or receive extra information.

For an external scheduling role, your policy could permit confirming meeting times with known attendees while requiring review before contacting anyone new. Specify the permitted subjects and recipients so the Agent can carry out its routine external work.

Handbook instructions guide behavior. They do not replace service-account permissions or create a hard boundary between conversations.

Test the proposed rule before saving

Ask the Agent to walk through invented requests without sending messages or changing work:

• An authorized coworker asks a routine question. It should answer within the approved subject area.
• That coworker adds an urgent project. It should follow the assignment and priority rules even when the requester calls the project urgent.
• A new external contact requests a call. It should check whether the contact is approved and obtain any required permission before arranging the call.

Review its proposed responses. If you disagree, clarify the rule before approving the update. Keep the Handbook focused on standing rules. Record one-off exceptions with the request and specify their scope.

Related

• Create and maintain policies in your Handbook
• Decide what information your agents may share
• Set autonomy, approval, and escalation rules

Ask your Agent to help