Who this is for. Super Admins setting up or maintaining an Agent Co-worker. See the Roles and Access.
What to settle before opening the wizard. Two of these cannot be changed comfortably afterwards, and one cannot be shared.
Required role
Creating and configuring an Agent Co-worker is a Super Admin action. No other role has access to the setup wizard.
Creating and editing an Agent Co-worker is governed by a single permission check that covers the whole wizard, not one check per function, so which functions it runs makes no difference. The wizard needs Update permission on AP procurement; in the shipped role definitions only Super Admin holds it. The AP manager, analyst and specialist roles have Read only.
What must already exist
Table 1. Prerequisites, and who provides them
Prerequisite |
Why it is needed |
Provided by |
|---|---|---|
System of record connection |
The agent queries it for vendors, invoices, payments, and purchase orders, and writes documents back to it. |
Super Admin |
Connected mailbox |
The agent monitors it for inbound vendor email. |
Super Admin |
Vendor master synchronized |
A vendor absent from the directory is treated as an Unknown sender. |
Super Admin |
Vendor contacts populated |
Sender matching resolves against these. |
Super Admin |
Mailbox history, ideally |
Category usage counts and suggested categories derive from real traffic. |
Time |
The integration user’s permissions are the real ceiling. A read-only integration user cannot post invoices, and no autonomy level or rule overrides that. No step in the wizard shows this permission, so ask the Super Admin who creates the connection to confirm the integration user can write invoices to the system of record before you configure the agent.
Required data state
Vendor records synchronized. External Sender classification matches inbound addresses against the vendor directory sourced from your system of record. A vendor absent there cannot be matched, and their email will be treated as Unknown.
Vendor categories present. Category-specific replies depend on vendor categories existing in your vendor data. If your vendors are not segmented, the Standard Vendor default still works.
Mailbox history, ideally. Email category usage counts and suggested categories both derive from what your mailbox has actually received. A brand-new mailbox gives you nothing to configure against.
Decision that cannot be undone
The system of record on an agent’s work scope is fixed after creation. Everything in steps 2 and 3 can be reopened and adjusted. An agent pointed at the wrong environment must be recreated rather than corrected, so settle sandbox versus production, and which of several systems of record, before you start.
Connections are created by a Super Admin, so this is a conversation to have first.
Decisions to make in advance
Each of these takes a conversation with your AP team rather than a click.
Decision |
What to settle |
|---|---|
Autonomy model |
Governed Autonomy is recommended for new Agent Co-workers. Choose Collaborative Mode only to maintain an existing configuration. |
Who counts as internal |
Individual colleagues, or whole mail domains. Internal classification grants the broadest access, so decide deliberately rather than adding everyone. |
Which platforms to trust |
The automated senders that mail your AP box: vendor ERPs, billing platforms, e-invoicing networks, payment processors. Decide whether to load them by CSV or add them individually. |
Which procedures must be enforced |
Which email categories and sender types the agent must never answer on its own, so a person always sees them first. You configure these later in the Processing Rules capability group, on the AP Helpdesk tab of the Define capabilities step. A processing rule sets what the agent does for a given email category and sender type. Processing rules are separate from business rules, which set or override field values on an invoice while it is being prepared and are configured for AP Invoices. For more information, see Create and Manage AP Helpdesk Processing Rules. |
Thread ownership |
Whether follow-up tasks stay with the analyst who opened a thread, or follow whoever has the oldest task still open. |
Archiving and SLA |
How long finished email stays in the Inbox view, and at what age an open task should be flagged. |
What you cannot do before activation
Two wizard steps, Exception treatment and Try out coworker, are placeholders in the current release and are skipped. There is no pre-activation test run, so plan to verify agent behavior against live mailbox traffic after activation rather than in a sandbox step.
This makes the pre-activation configuration review more important than it would otherwise be. For more information, see Review and Activate.
Governed Autonomy is the model new Agent Co-workers use where your tenant is set up for it. Whether the Autonomy level step appears, and so whether Collaborative Mode can be chosen, is configured for your tenant by Auditoria. Where the step is not shown, there is nothing to choose. An Agent Co-worker already saved in Collaborative Mode is the exception: it keeps the Autonomy level step, so it can be moved to Governed Autonomy.
Related information
For the shape of the wizard and the order to work in, see The Agent Co-worker Setup Wizard.
For the page instances are opened and managed from, see The Agent Co-workers Page.
For the step-by-step procedure, see Create an Agent Co-worker.