Look at where a senior operations person's week goes. Much of it is not spent doing the work. It is spent moving it: reading what came in and deciding who should have it, chasing the person who is holding things up, and copying figures from three places into a report for someone else.

None of this appears in a job description. All of it has to happen, or the business stops. Call it the work between the work. In the old playbook, people did it by hand because there was nobody else to do it. In the new playbook, it is the first work AI agents should take on.

This piece is for the COO who wants their team's time back without losing control of how work moves.

Three kinds of work between the work

Intake. Requests arrive by email, phone, WhatsApp, forms and meetings. Someone has to read each one, work out what it is and send it to the right owner. When that person is away, requests wait in an inbox nobody else watches.

Coordination. Most work passes through several hands: sales to operations, operations to a supplier, the supplier back to finance. Every hand-off needs someone to notice it has stalled and to chase it. That someone is usually your most reliable manager, because they are the one who notices.

Reporting. Every week, people gather numbers and updates from different systems and shape them into something a leader can read. The report is accurate on the day it is sent and out of date soon after.

Why the old answers stop working

The old playbook has three answers to this work, and each one adds a layer.

You can hire a coordinator. That works until the business grows again, and the coordinator becomes the bottleneck.

You can add a tool. Each new tool brings its own inbox, its own logins and its own report, and someone still has to move work between them.

You can ask managers to chase. This answer needs no budget, which is why it is so easy to fall back on. Its cost is that the people with the best judgement spend their days as couriers.

All three treat the work between the work as a staffing problem. It is a design problem. The work follows rules the business already knows, even if nobody has written them down.

Why AI agents fit this work

Intake, coordination and reporting share three traits that make them the right place to start with AI agents.

  1. They happen constantly. Requests arrive every day, so the business quickly sees whether the agents are getting them right.
  2. They follow rules you can write down. Which requests go to whom, how long a hand-off may wait before someone is chased, which numbers belong in which report.
  3. Their results can be checked against a record. Did the request reach the right owner? Was the follow-up sent? Does the report match its sources?

That last trait matters most. Work that can be checked is work where AI agents can earn trust step by step, on evidence rather than on promises.

What stays with people

Handing over the work between the work does not mean handing over the business. Set these lines before any agent starts:

  • Priorities stay human. Agents route work by the rules you set. People decide what matters most each week.
  • Exceptions go to a person. When a request fits no rule, the agent passes it on with what it knows, and does not guess.
  • Relationships stay human. A long-standing client's call, a supplier under strain, a team member having a hard month: these are not routing problems.
  • Commitments need a person's approval. Anything that changes a price, a promise or a payment waits for a named person.

Agents start with a narrow scope. That scope widens only when the record shows they have earned it. That is earned autonomy, and some decisions never move.

Three questions for your next operations meeting

Ask your team:

  1. Who here spends most of their week moving work rather than doing it?
  2. Which requests arrive with no clear owner, and how do we find out when one is missed?
  3. Which report do we build by hand every week, and who acts on it?

The answers show you where the work between the work sits in your business, and how much of your team's judgement it is using up.

The new playbook

The old playbook grew the business by adding people to move the work. The new playbook gives that work to AI agents, under rules the business sets, and gives people back the time to decide, create and look after relationships. Human creativity stays the catalyst.

At Futuvara, we build, implement and run AI platforms where AI agents do defined work under rules your business sets. If you want to find the work between the work in your business and decide what AI agents should take first, start a conversation.