---
title: "Agents can do the work"
description: "Agent evaluations often ask what an AI Agent can do, but the larger constraint may be whether an organization is structured to let it act. Across organizations in energy, healthcare, ecommerce, gaming, financial services, and property management, teams found that Agents could often perform actions technically, but stalled on unreliable identification, inaccessible live data, or unreachable vendor systems. The post describes five readiness types—content, scope, procedural, data, and execution—and says deeper automation depends on documented processes, trustworthy connected data, stable APIs, and clear ownership of risk. Teams that lacked these foundations often redesigned toward guiding users rather than executing changes, while teams with standardized operations could trigger tightly controlled actions. The unresolved question is how readiness develops, since the gaps may involve undocumented procedures, fragmented systems, missing APIs, or infrastructure and accountability investments beyond buying a more capable Agent."
---

# Agents can do the work

[Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom) · Jennifer Murphy · May 18, 2026

**Type:** Explainer

## Summary

Agent evaluations often ask what an AI Agent can do, but the larger constraint may be whether an organization is structured to let it act. Across organizations in energy, healthcare, ecommerce, gaming, financial services, and property management, teams found that Agents could often perform actions technically, but stalled on unreliable identification, inaccessible live data, or unreachable vendor systems. The post describes five readiness types—content, scope, procedural, data, and execution—and says deeper automation depends on documented processes, trustworthy connected data, stable APIs, and clear ownership of risk. Teams that lacked these foundations often redesigned toward guiding users rather than executing changes, while teams with standardized operations could trigger tightly controlled actions. The unresolved question is how readiness develops, since the gaps may involve undocumented procedures, fragmented systems, missing APIs, or infrastructure and accountability investments beyond buying a more capable Agent.

## Context

Organizations are often using Agents for answering and routing while avoiding lookups, actions, and complex multi-step work. The analysis argues that this limitation is frequently organizational rather than purely technical, with gaps in process documentation, data access and reliability, system connectivity, and ownership of execution risk.

## Approach / What changed

The analysis identifies five forms of readiness—content, scope, procedural, data, and execution—and examines organizations across six industries attempting to expand Agent automation. It compares technically feasible actions with the operational, data, infrastructure, and accountability conditions required to execute them safely.

## Takeaways

- Readiness has five dimensions: content, scope, procedural, data, and execution. Most organizations have the first two, while fewer have reliable processes, connected data, stable systems, and accepted ownership of execution risk.
- Teams attempting application changes, billing automation, or third-party status checks often encountered unreliable identity resolution, regulatory limits on live data, or inaccessible vendor systems, then shifted toward guiding users through processes.
- Deeper automation was associated with standardized operations: actions were already well-defined, consistently applied, and exposed through stable systems with clear rules, rather than requiring the Agent to invent new behavior.

**Tags:** [AI Agents](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ai-agents), [Automation](https://yomu.fyi/topic/automation)

- Source: [Intercom](https://www.intercom.com/blog/agents-can-do-the-work)
- Source URL: https://www.intercom.com/blog/agents-can-do-the-work
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-09-09T08:21:30.982Z

[Read original post](https://www.intercom.com/blog/agents-can-do-the-work)