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Field Notes

Anatomy of a working agent

Not a chatbot you query. It runs scheduled work on its own and can work through a messy internal workbook faster than a person can open it. Here is what one of ours actually does — with identifying details removed or blended.

One of our agents works alongside an operating team. It is always on and handles recurring analysis, reporting, and follow-through across messy internal files and message threads. Its work falls into five buckets.

01

Recurring reporting, on a fixed cadence

Weekly commercial reports, scorecards, and executive summaries — pulled from messy spreadsheets, reconciled across sources, and delivered ready to read. Scheduling is automated; material decisions stay with the human owner.

02

Analysis on demand

Drop a spreadsheet into chat and the agent spins up a background worker to parse it, cross-reference it against history, build the charts, and send back findings — usually in minutes. The inputs are rarely clean. Handling that mess is half the job.

03

Drafting and communication

Executive emails, meeting-prep briefs, and analysis write-ups — adapted to the audience and the channel.

04

Proactive monitoring

Scheduled health checks, periodic inbox sweeps, calendar-aware nudges, and quiet self-maintenance — so things get caught before they become problems.

05

Institutional memory

Structured records of what was decided and why. Ask “what did we settle on three weeks ago?” and get the decision and the reasoning behind it, instead of a shrug.

Every deployment is different — a research agent, a comms agent, and a finance agent share almost no daily tasks. What they share is the shape: scoped to real work, deployed where the work already happens, and accountable to a human who can see what they did.