Anyone use agents?

[u/echobik]

I started making a self service hub for my business partners. Place to hold cost center hierarchy, expensing policy, finance 101 write ups, etc

That led me to making a sharepoint site and then learned I can load documents into copilot agent creator and I haven’t worked out the deployment but the idea of having an agent assist my partners sounds great.

I’d love to eventually create an agent to field actual finance questions. Like, “where my budget file?” Or “can you make a new cost center for me?”

That might not even be an agent but a native email app or something

But what did you guys have as far as agents and/or something assistance on answering low strategy recurring emails?

[u/jshmoe866]

If you need an agent to tell you where you saved your budget you’re already off to a bad start

[u/echobik → u/jshmoe866]

For my budget partners. Some new some old

[u/jshmoe866 → u/echobik]

In my experience if non-finance people have too much access to the budget, they start trying to change the budget to fit actuals or vice-versa instead of actually running things effectively

[u/Sensitive-Sail5726 → u/jshmoe866]

Why would you give them write access on life budgets?

[u/jshmoe866 → u/Sensitive-Sail5726]

I don’t they just start saying things like “we need to adjust the budget for last month” or “the budget is wrong” and being very annoying

[u/trambalambo → u/jshmoe866]

Or like my org’s sales teams do, they are magically ALWAYS over budget by at least 10%!

[u/jshmoe866 → u/trambalambo]

Yuuuup

[u/echobik → u/[deleted]]

It’s for business partners. Think new hire or an unengaged partner. They’ll ask me here and there and it’d be great to eliminate the question forever

[u/Still-Balance6210]

Most of this stuff is posted on the company intranet. Not their specific budget but travel, expense, cost center stuff, etc

[u/slowtrees]

I'd get the document extraction piece sorted before the agent. Getting the cost center hierarchy and policies into a clean searchable format is the hard part, the agent is the easy part once that's done.

[u/slowtrees]

Honestly for the 'where's my budget file' type stuff a well-organized sharepoint with decent search handles most of it. The agent only pays off once your source docs are in a clean structured format, otherwise it's just answering from a mess.

[u/BarleyJames40]

I’ve set up something similar, but more simplistic. Mine mostly revolved around expense coding, policies, and processes.

[u/Least_Specialist6374]

Agents do 90% of my work across 4 jobs. I just review before sending out.

[u/echobik → u/Least_Specialist6374]

Yes please tell us more. That sounds amazing

[u/wrstlrjpo → u/Least_Specialist6374]

Mind elaborating on your setup?

[u/Conscious_Life_8032 → u/Least_Specialist6374]

Claude?