Agentic AI behaves less like software and more like a new recruit

For a new hire to succeed, they need to understand context: how teams work together, what their role is and what ‘good’ looks like. Throw them in the deep end without that structure and they’ll be forced to improvise. Agentic appsdo the same, only at machine speed.

In other words, agentic apps need agency.

True agency isn’t about autonomy for its own sake. It’s the capacity to act with purpose, context and judgment to achieve a meaningful outcome. Creating that kind of agency inside a business requires structure. Without it, systems don’t become intelligent operators. They become fast improvisers.

The good news is that giving your new AI ‘hire’ a strong start isn’t complicated. But it does require structure, and clarity in a few key areas.

Designing agency for how your business works

An agentic app isn’t magic. Nor is it a mind reader.

To run parts of your business well, agentic apps need:

• Clear goals: what “good” means for a process, and how to trade off speed, cost and risk
• Clear logic: which signals matter, which rules apply and when to escalate
• Clear context: where the trusted data lives and how systems and teams connect

In most businesses, that logic is scattered: some lives in tools or processes, the rest lives in people’s heads. When you bring AI into that environment unprepared, it runs into a wall of ambiguity.

This is often why AI pilots stall. The technology is capable, but the operating model is opaque.

When those elements are made explicit, agency stops being risky and starts being useful. You end up with a shared understanding of how your business works that both humans and systems can follow.

How do we make it explicit? We've created the schema that maps out all of your shared goals and understandings, so there's no confusion and everything is traceable.

The goals you set shape how systems behave

Humans can navigate fuzzy goals through context. AI can’t: it optimises whatever signal is clearest.

If goals aren’t explicit, structured and weighted, the system will lock onto what’s easiest to quantify, for example speed, cost or volume, rather than what the business values most. It isn’t being “unintelligent”; it just hasn’t been told the full story.

A clear objective gives AI the same orientation a new hire gets on their first day: here’s what matters, here’s why and here’s how it connects to the whole.

If your goals aren’t explicit, structured and weighted, they’ll optimise for whatever signal is loudest — often the one that’s easiest to measure, not the one that matters. That’s how sales AI apps end up chasing deal velocity over deal value, or a support system might optimise closing tickets fast, but complex issues are closed prematurely and customer trust erodes because speed was easy to measure and satisfaction wasnDefining outcomes turns activity into impact

When an agentic appfinishes a task, how do you know it delivered the outcome you actually needed?

Gartner has warned that many workflows are being automated around completion, not performance, producing “efficiency without effectiveness.” In other words: lots of things get finished; fewer things move the needle.​

Most human workflows end in tacit judgment. Someone glances at a report, decides it’s “fine,” and ships it. The criteria live in people’s heads. Agentic systems can’t work with that.

If “done” isn’t defined, they’ll happily generate perfectly formatted, utterly useless outputs — reports with every requested field but no insight, support emails that resolve tickets while quietly eroding trust.​ There’s a reason “AI slop” was Macquarie Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2025.

The fix is to treat the outcome as the real job, not the output. An output is just a thing that exists; an outcome is a change that matters.

So for every automated workflow, spell out the practical goal: What decision should this help someone make? What action should it lead to? What improvement should it create? We help you define your goals and decisions with a series of questions and answers, constantly updating, running across every interaction and every page within Decidr.

This gives your agentic apps simple, concrete signals to measure what “good” looks like, how quickly it should happen, and which assumptions about your customers or market should hold true, and how to allocate resources that day, that hour. When you define success this way, your systems stop chasing busywork and start chasing impact.

When systems can evaluate their work against outcomes rather than checklists, they stop being task executors and start behaving like outcome owners.

Who’s responsible when your coworker isn’t a human?

Every new hire performs better with a clear remit. What they own, when they should act, and when to bring in others. That clarity gives people confidence to move quickly without overstepping.

AI works the same way.

When it’s obvious where automation fits and where human judgment still applies, agentic systems can act decisively and teams know when to trust them.

When ownership is clear, accountability stays intact. Agency becomes a shared capability rather than a black box.

Why it matters

As AI takes on more meaningful work, you have a real opportunity to design how intelligence shows up inside your business.

When systems are given clarity on their role, priorities and measures of success, they stop behaving like tools and start contributing like capable teammates. Agency becomes something you can rely on rather than manage around.

This is where Decidr fits.

We provide a shared structure of meaning so agentic apps don’t just act, they align. Goals, data, workflows and decisions are connected through a single schema that reflects how your business works and what it’s trying to achieve.

That structure doesn’t just describe the organisation. It brings it to life in digital form, allowing intent to flow consistently across teams and systems.

This is what makes Decidr agentic rather than simply autonomous. It doesn’t just automate activity. It creates coherence, turning work into progress and progress into learning. Instead of disconnected tools, your business starts behaving as a coordinated whole.

You don’t need to change how ambitious your organisation is. You just need a way to express that ambition clearly enough for both people and systems to act on it.

Decidr is built to support exactly that, so your business can grow more capable, more aligned, and more intelligent over time.