How do you turn a manual process into an agent workflow?

The first move is observation rather than description, because a described process and a performed process differ in a consistent way. Descriptions contain the intended path and omit the exceptions, the checks people make without noticing, the cases they handle differently and the judgements that have become automatic. Those omissions are precisely the content that determines whether an automated version works, so asking somebody to write down how they do it produces a document that is accurate and incomplete in exactly the wrong places.

What to record is the decisions, not the actions. Opening the record, checking the field, sending the message are steps; deciding this is urgent, deciding this customer gets the exception, deciding this needs a person are decisions. The steps are the easy part to automate and the decisions are where the process actually lives, and a specification built from steps produces something that performs the motions and gets the outcomes wrong.

Then classify each decision by whether it can be written as a rule. Most can, and this is usually a surprise: what felt like judgement turns out to be a condition nobody had articulated, and articulating it is itself valuable. The residue that genuinely resists — reading what a customer meant, weighing two considerations, recognising an unusual case — is the part that needs a model, and it is normally one or two decisions rather than the whole process.

The exceptions deserve a separate pass because they are where automated versions fail and where descriptions never go. Ask what happens when the usual thing does not apply, and keep asking until the answers stop. Every exception is either a rule to write, a case to route to a person, or evidence that the process is more varied than a single workflow can serve. Discovering the third at this stage is much cheaper than discovering it after building.

Build the smallest version that handles the common path and routes everything else, then run it alongside the manual process for one full cycle with the disagreements recorded. That comparison is the specification for the second version, and it is built from real cases rather than from anyone's account of them. Businesses that skip it build the version described to them and then discover what the process actually contains.

One thing to decide early: what the automated version does not do. A process that has been performed by a person contains judgements they made for reasons they may not be able to state, and inheriting all of them is not the objective. Being explicit that the workflow handles this and not that produces a narrower thing that works rather than a broad one that half works.