So far your agent can think and decide. To act, it needs connections: a way to talk to you, tools to do work, and permission to use your accounts. Add these deliberately, one at a time, with limits set before you switch anything on.
Give it a way to reach you
The most useful connection is a messaging channel, so the agent lives where you already are instead of in yet another dashboard. Many people connect an agent to a chat app like Slack or Telegram, so it can send you the morning brief or ask a quick approval, and you can reply in a sentence.
Give it tools, narrowly
Tools are how an agent does real work: reading a calendar, searching the web, updating a document, posting an update. The rule is simple and it is the most important rule in this course:
Handle credentials with care
To use your accounts, an agent needs credentials, the digital keys to those services. Treat them the way you would treat a spare house key.
- Store keys in the platform's secret storage, never pasted into instructions or a chat.
- Prefer read-only or limited access where the service offers it.
- Use a separate key per agent so you can revoke one without touching the rest.
- Keep those keys off your laptop and in the agent's managed home, as covered in Lesson 4.
Keep a human in the loop
For anything that spends money, sends a message on your behalf, or cannot be undone, the safe default is approval before action. The agent prepares the step and waits for your yes. As your trust in a specific task grows, you can loosen the leash on that task deliberately, not by accident.
Example
Brakes in practice
A lead-follow-up agent researches each new inbound lead, drafts a tailored reply in your tone, then messages you: "Draft ready for the new lead from [company], send it?" You reply yes. It sends only what you approved, from an account scoped to it alone, and keeps a record of everything it did. Useful, and firmly under control.
Set spending caps, scope every connection, and start every risky action behind an approval. With the brakes installed, you can let an agent do more with less worry. In the final lesson we look at what happens when one reliable agent turns into several, and a helper becomes a small operation, a team rollout, or a service someone pays you for.