What is an Agent (and why you probably don’t need one yet)

Most people who ask us for an agent are asking for the wrong thing. Not because agents aren’t real, but because the word now covers everything from a chat window to software that runs your business while you sleep. So, definitions first.

What an agent is

An agent is Claude with a goal, a set of tools, and permission to keep going without asking you. It reads, decides, acts, checks the result and acts again, until the goal is met or it gets stuck. The point is autonomy. You state the outcome, not the steps.

That autonomy is what makes an agent useful, and what makes it expensive to do properly. Every tool it can touch is a tool it can misuse. Every step it takes without asking is a step you had to think about in advance. Building one well means building the permissions, the guardrails, the logging and the review process around it, then maintaining all of that every time the model underneath changes.

What a skill is

A skill is much smaller. It is a written procedure Claude follows when a person asks it to do a specific job: draft the client update in the house format, turn meeting notes into actions with owners, check a proposal against the pricing rules. A person invokes it, watches the result and decides what to do with it. No autonomy, no tools running unattended, no surprises overnight.

A skill is quick to write, quick to fix and easy to retire. It needs a named owner and a peer reviewer. When it fails, it fails in small, visible ways, in front of the person who asked.

Why you probably don’t need one yet

Here is the pattern we keep seeing. A leader signs off on Claude seats. Months later, utilisation is thin, the people who do use it are using it for email, and the board asks what the seats delivered. The instinct is to reach for something bigger and more impressive: an agent that will finally show the value.

An agent sitting on top of a workforce that has not learned to work with the model is a fast way to spend more money for the same result. It inherits every gap in your policy, your training and your habits, then runs with them unattended.

In our own firm’s Claude rollout we ended up with 25 skills, each with a named owner and each peer reviewed before publish. No agents. The skills did the work people had imagined an agent would do, and did it where everyone could see it, correct it and improve it. When someone asks us for an agent now, we ask which three skills and which policy they have in place first, because most businesses that ask for an agent need exactly that: three skills and a policy.

When you will need one

You will know. The skills will be in daily use, the same hand-offs will keep happening between them, and the owners will be asking for the steps to be joined up. That is the moment to talk about an agent, and by then you will know precisely what you want it to do and what it must never do.

Until then, the best thing you can build is the habit. When the time comes, we build the agent too.