In the age of digital transformation, businesses have faced a trade-off: Speed and scale often come at the cost of genuine human connection. But now, with the rise of AI agents, that equation is changing — it doesn’t have to be a choice.Companies can move faster and get closer. Automate more and care more. The most successful companies deeply understand their customers’ needs, their journey, and their timing. AI agents enable them to provide the right help at the right moment, at scale.This is the promise of the agentic enterprise — the next evolution of business, where trusted AI agents handle the busywork so your people can focus on what truly matters: Building trust, solving complex problems, and creating meaningful relationships.A Strategic Framework for AI Agent SuccessThe potential is so great, getting started can feel daunting. The most successful AI deployments don’t begin with code, but with a clear, strategic framework. Building an AI agent is more than just a technical task; it’s a strategic process that requires a comprehensive plan. It’s like writing a job description, architecting an IT system, onboarding a new employee, and building software all at the same time.When I work with customers, I like to start with a five-step process to define key attributes that provide a clear blueprint for success — helping move from agentic ambition to results, with confidence.Step 1: Define the Agent’s Role and MissionThe first and most crucial step is to decide what outcomes you want to drive and the agent’s role in achieving them — much like you would create a job description that outlines goals, swimlanes, tasks, and success metrics for a human employee. What business function will it serve — sales, marketing, or customer service? What are its ultimate goals? You’re giving your agent a mission statement and defining the business processes and logic it should use.For example, a large healthcare company was grappling with how to handle a massive spike in customer inquiries during open enrollment, which overwhelms their human support teams every year. Training and scaling a human workforce to handle complex, nuanced support issues for only a short period of time isn’t practical, so they wanted to see if agentic AI could help.First, they defined their agent’s role: to support their human workforce by handling common questions and guiding customers through the enrollment process, deciding when to escalate to a human to handle more complex cases. Having a clear vision of the agent’s role and purpose allowed the company to define what topics it should cover, and and then provide clear instructions on how to proceed.2. Fuel Your AI Agent With Relevant DataOnce the role is clear, you need to equip your agent with the right context. Just like human employees, an AI agent’s effectiveness hinges on the information it can access and learn from.In the healthcare example, the agent needed to do more than just answer general FAQs. To provide personalized service, it required access to a wide range of data, from unstructured conversations between patients and healthcare providers, to structured customer health records and insurance policies — unified to give the agent a complete view of the patient. This ability to integrate, ingest, and process diverse data sources helped the agent generate answers specifically tailored to each patient. Without proper data, agents ultimately end up needing to hand off more cases to humans, greatly reducing the opportunity to maximize human workers’ potential.3. Empower Your Agent With Autonomous ActionsWith a defined role and access to the right data, you then want to empower your agent to act. This is where you determine its autonomous capabilities and the business processes it can execute.For example, the healthcare agent can verify insurance coverage based on the patient’s specific plan and policy, share recommended appointment times and schedule them, and even make personalized recommendations for ongoing care based on a patient’s history.The key is not to reinvent the wheel. First, focus on automating the time-consuming, repetitive tasks that already exist in your workflows, so your human employees can focus on higher-value work and spend more time with the patients themselves4. Set Clear Guardrails and Escalation PathsAn agent’s ability to handle complex and sensitive tasks — like managing health information — makes guardrails essential. By defining guardrails for your agents, you prevent unintended actions. What actions should they avoid, and which ones require additional oversight?For the healthcare company, this meant establishing a clear protocol for when to hand off a task to a human. For example, the agent was programmed to identify potentially concerning symptom patterns and immediately escalate the case to a human physician for review. This gave the agent the autonomy to act but also the wisdom to know when to ask for help.5. Define the Channels Where Your Agent OperatesThe final step is to determine where and how the agent will operate. Will it be a public-facing assistant on your website, a collaborator with human teams in a platform like Slack, or a back-end bot working with other agents and automating processes in the background?For the healthcare company, this meant ensuring the agent operated exclusively within HIPAA-compliant systems, protecting sensitive patient data and building trust with both patients and providers.Architecting for a Fully Agentic EnterpriseThese five attributes help ensure your agents get off to the right start, with clear goals, guidelines, and autonomy to be successful. The journey doesn’t end with a launch; it’s just the beginning.Once deployed, evaluation, management, and ongoing adjustment are key to ensuring their ongoing success — just like human employees thrive with practical guidance and performance goals. As the agent proves its value and accelerates in its role, it can be “promoted” by revisiting these five steps to layer in new capabilities throughout. In doing so, you can unlock further potential within your workforce and create a deeper connection between employees and customers.Platforms like Agentforce, coupled with the broader Salesforce ecosystem, provide the necessary tools to build and manage agents, unify data, and take action directly in the flow of work. This strategic, platform-driven approach enables organizations to transform ambitious AI aspirations into tangible business results, thereby accelerating their journey toward becoming a fully agentic enterprise.The post Five Steps to Build AI Agents that Actually Deliver Business Results appeared first on The New Stack.