We’re past the demo phase. Boards are asking a harder question: how do human-plus-agent workflows show up in cash flow—this quarter? There is a clear answer: The winners don’t “add an agent”; they redesign the work. That means owners, SLAs, guardrails, and value tracking—weekly. Not glamorous, just effective.

Here’s the short playbook I’d bring to the next ExCo:

• Make Agents products. Name a product owner, publish SLAs (latency, accuracy, human-override rate), and set chargeback so value—and cost—land in the P&L.
• Design human+agent flow, end-to-end. Pilots fail for organizational reasons. Tie every pilot to a customer metric and a service level from day one.
• Build guardrails you can audit. Map risks to NIST’s Cyber AI Profile; log decisions, provenance, and incidents. “Trust” that isn’t evidenced will stall at Legal.

Does it pay?  Signals are real but uneven. A European bank modernization program cut 35-70% cycle time with reusable “agent components.” In KYC/AML, agent “factories” show 200-2000% productivity potential when humans supervise at scale. Klarna’s AI assistant handles  ~1.3M monthly interactions (~800 FTEs) with CSAT parity. Yet BCG says only ~5% are truly at value-at-scale, and Gartner warns ~40% of agentic projects could be scrapped by 2027. Operating model discipline determines who wins.

If I had 90 days:

• 30: Inventory top 5 agent candidates; assign owners; baseline SLAs and override rates.
• 60: Stand up an Agent Review Board (CIO/CDO/GC/CISO); add release gates and rollback.
• 90: Ship two agents to production; publish a value dashboard (savings, cycle time, SLA hit rate) and decide scale/retire.

A candid note on risk: labor anxiety and model drift will erase ROI if we skip change management and runtime oversight. Bring HR and the 2nd line in early, and rehearse incidents like you would a cyber tabletop.

If we can’t show weekly value, SLA adherence, and audit-ready evidence, we’re still in pilot land—no matter how advanced the model sounds.

What would make your CFO believe – tomorrow – that an agent belongs on the P&L?