Use cases and final project

Lists of use cases by industry run long. Most cases share the same traits, which are more useful to remember than the list itself.

Examples by industry

• Customer service: understand the request, open a ticket, offer a refund, escalate complex cases.
• IT: monitor, diagnose, propose a fix.
• HR: answer common questions, process leave requests.
• Sales: qualify prospects, prepare meetings.
• Supply chain: assess suppliers, flag risks.

Published gains often come from commercial sources. Before quoting a number, trace it to its source.

A good candidate for an agent

• The input is unstructured and the path varies.
• Mistakes can be detected and repaired.
• The task takes long enough to justify the cost.
• A human can take over.

Four options, not one

• Human: judgment, ethics, accountability.
• Rules: known, stable logic with no room for error. Payments, format validation.
• Machine learning: patterns in past data, such as fraud.
• Generative AI and agents: unstructured data, reasoning, language.

Systems that work often combine all four. The useful question is: how much unpredictability can this task tolerate?

Final project

Bring the running project together: a refund agent you could show in an interview.

• Three tools, one of them irreversible and under human approval
• A bounded loop and a log of every step
• Two knowledge sources with routing
• A cap in the code that resists injection
• 30 evaluation cases, with pass rate, cost per task and causes of failure
• A README that says what doesn’t work yet

A demo shows it worked once. An evaluation shows how often.

function costPerSuccess({ runCost, successRate, humanCost }) {
  const failureRate = 1 - successRate;
  const total = runCost + failureRate * humanCost;
  return Math.round((total / successRate) * 100) / 100;
}

const agent = { runCost: 0.4, successRate: 0.8, humanCost: 6 };

costPerSuccess(agent);

1function costPerTask(t) {2  // TODO3  return 0;4}56function decide(t) {7  // TODO8  return { automate: false, costPerTask: 0, monthlySaving: 0, paybackMonths: null };9}