The first wave of enterprise AI was built on question answering: assistants connected to a document pool, replying to questions in text. They are useful, but they have a limit. They answer; they do not do the work. The user still logs into the system, opens the record themselves, requests the approval themselves. The time saved stays at information access; it never reaches the work itself.
The second wave comes with language models able to use tools. The model no longer just produces text; it can call defined functions. That means steps such as classifying a request, pulling data from the relevant systems, checking the rules, opening the record and reporting the result can run within a single flow. The critical point is this: that power is limited to the tools defined and the permissions granted. An agent can do no more than what you have defined.
That is why four things sit at the centre of the flows we build. Tool definitions: which functions the agent may call and what each one does is written down explicitly. Permission boundaries: which operations may run directly, which require human approval, and above which amount no automatic operation happens at all. Rollback: how to reverse a step that went wrong is built in advance. Audit trail: which decision was made with which data and through which steps is retained.
The level of autonomy is a business decision, not a technology decision, and it is set together with the customer. In some flows the agent only prepares and presents everything to a human; in others it completes low-risk operations itself and drops anything above the line to approval. The right start is almost always low autonomy: the system suggests, a human approves, and the boundary widens as trust accumulates. Set-ups that start with high autonomy get switched off entirely at the first serious mistake, and the project loses trust irreversibly.