The watching problem
A lot of important work is mostly watching: competitors, regulators, customers, a support queue, a set of operational numbers. None of it feels urgent until something has been missed.
So the watching gets done unevenly. People check when they have time, existing tools send alerts nobody reads, and important changes are noticed late.
What a monitoring agent does
Each agent runs the same continuous loop:
- Collect from defined sources, on a schedule or as information arrives: websites, news, filings, databases, feeds, inboxes, tickets, social channels or internal systems.
- Compare: what’s new or different since last time.
- Assess whether each change matters, using criteria the organization has defined.
- Summarize the relevant changes plainly, with context and links to the sources.
- Deliver the summary where people will see it: an email, a team channel, a dashboard.
- Escalate urgent items immediately, to the right person.
The result should read like a short note from a well-informed colleague, not a feed.
Examples
- Competitors. New products, pricing changes, hiring patterns, announcements and positioning shifts.
- Regulation and policy. Proposed rules, consultations and decisions relevant to the organization.
- Customer feedback. Themes emerging across support tickets, reviews, surveys and sales calls.
- Operations. Metrics moving outside expected ranges, with a plain explanation.
- Reputation and media. Coverage and conversation about the organization and its sector.
- Funding and opportunities. Grants, tenders or partnerships that match defined criteria.
- Internal systems. Stalled projects, overdue tasks or unusual activity worth a second look.
When they’re worth building
Agents earn their keep when a task has many steps, happens often and follows judgment you can describe. Monitoring fits, provided:
- The sources are identifiable and accessible, publicly or through connected systems.
- Relevance can be defined. The organization can describe a change worth reporting, even if that’s refined over time.
- Someone will act on it. Reports need to reach people who can do something with them.
Defining what matters
An agent’s quality depends mostly on how well relevance is defined. Too broad, and it’s another noisy feed; too narrow, and it misses things. With the people who’ll receive the reports, we define:
- Which sources to watch, and how much to trust each.
- Which kinds of change matter, and which are noise.
- How urgent each kind is, and who should hear about it.
- What a good summary looks like: length, format, level of detail.
We then run the agent alongside the team, compare its reports with what they’d have flagged, and refine the criteria until the reports are reliably useful.
Narrow permissions, clear limits
Monitoring agents mostly read, with access only to the sources they need, read-only wherever possible. A person decides what happens after an alert. When confidence is low, the agent says so instead of presenting a guess as a finding, and every report links to its sources.
Keeping it simple
We build monitoring agents with direct calls to the model and the sources, adding a framework only when the problem needs one. Fewer moving parts make an agent cheaper to run, easier to adjust and easier to trust.
From first version to everyday use
We start with the watching work that matters most and slips most often, and build a first version quickly. Once its reports are consistently useful, we hand it over with clear controls for sources and criteria, and keep tuning and extending it with your team.