Not every workflow is a good first agent. The ones that pay off fastest in a B2B SaaS company share a shape: high volume, clear success criteria, and a cost that someone on the leadership team already feels. Pick by that shape and the first deployment funds the next three.
Support triage is usually the fastest win — the volume is there, the right answer is knowable, and the time saved is easy to measure. Onboarding comes next: an agent that gets a new customer to first value faster moves retention in a way the whole business notices. Renewal-risk signals are higher-leverage but need more data plumbing, so we sequence them after the easier wins have earned trust.
The discipline is resisting the temptation to start with the most exciting workflow instead of the most tractable one. Time-to-value is the metric. The exciting build is more fun on day one and far more likely to stall in pilot purgatory.
