Screenshots are not a process

Standard operating procedures in regulated industries capture what a person sees and clicks. Buykin said those legacy SOPs are a bunch of screenshots in sequence.

An agent SOP needs preconditions, decisions, identifiers, back-end calls, validation, recovery and evidence of successful execution. Experts own the what. Agents own the how.

The corpus is the asset. It is 20 to 1 versus runtime, modified for country conditions, and illustrated by an SAP slide where the same process means different things in different countries.

Production runs over 200 instances concurrently. Spikes and latencies range from a few minutes to 10 minutes, limited by legacy back ends, not the agent loop.

Buykin said the team does not use MCPs because bloated system responses need distilling. They tune tools through function calling to control quality.

His five moves: make work representable, make execution bounded, make behavior observable, make correction cheap, and make improvement compound. Successful sequences are merged into larger composite tools that roll out across hundreds of countries at once.

Why this matters

This flips the usual agent demo narrative. Model capability is not the constraint. Representing messy operational knowledge safely is.

For enterprises, accuracy was earned one small correction at a time, not designed in one diagram. Pipe coding and spec driven development plateaued early, Buykin showed, and real gains came after.

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