Overview
- Agents earn trust through narrow, well-defined tool boundaries.
- Consequential actions need human checkpoints and audit trails.
- Agent quality is an evaluation problem, not a prompt problem.
Scope
Start from a workflow, not from an agent
Successful business agents automate one accountable workflow — order review, report assembly, exception triage — with explicit inputs, outputs, owners, and escalation paths defined before any code.
- Map the human workflow first, then decide which steps the agent owns.
- Keep the agent's mandate small enough to explain in one sentence.
Tools
Tool boundaries are the real safety surface
With ADK, each tool the agent can call is a typed, permissioned contract to an enterprise API. The agent reasons freely, but it can only act through tools that validate inputs and enforce the caller's entitlements.
- Validate tool arguments against schemas before invocation.
- Scope tool permissions to the requesting user, never a super-user identity.
Accountability
Checkpoints, state, and evaluation loops
Production agents keep durable state for long-running workflows, pause at human checkpoints for consequential actions, and run against labeled evaluation scenarios on every change.
- Record every reasoning step, tool call, and approval in an audit trail.
- Treat agent regressions like failing tests: block release until resolved.