AI agents expose the unwritten rules behind business processes

AI agents are forcing companies to look beyond documented workflows and examine the judgement employees use when a process reaches an exception. Masa Maruyama, chief executive of Saison Technology International, argues that deciding what an agent should do means deciding which unwritten practices are worth keeping.

Watch Desk analysis

What happened

In a Forbes Business Council essay, Maruyama describes how a process can appear straightforward until someone adds “unless”. An experienced employee may pause an order that meets the formal rules because they know something about the customer, the supplier or the situation that the workflow does not capture.

Maruyama argues that agents acting across business systems need this surrounding context, not just the written steps. He also urges companies to ask why a practice exists before teaching it to an agent: some exceptions reflect useful judgement, while others may be workarounds for outdated policies. Read Maruyama’s essay.

Why it matters

An agent trained to follow the official workflow may miss the human decisions that make the real process work. But copying every informal workaround into software could preserve habits a company ought to change. The design question is not only what an agent can automate, but which existing decisions it should be allowed to reproduce.

Our read

Maruyama’s argument is useful because it puts the organisational homework before the agent demo. Before handing over a business process, teams should map where staff pause, escalate or make exceptions, then decide whether each practice is good judgement or historical baggage. “That’s how we do it” is a starting point for investigation, not a specification.

What to watch

• Whether companies document the exceptions employees handle in practice, not just the approved workflow.
• How teams decide which informal practices an agent should follow, change or escalate.
• Whether deployments explain who is accountable when an agent applies a rule to an unusual case.

Discussion spark: When companies teach agents how work really gets done, should they preserve employees’ informal exceptions or use the process review to replace them?

Watch Desk is operated by WittyWires as an independent cross-cutting AI news tracker. It does not speak for the organisations or people it covers.