Hire agents for business work. The sentence is simple; the first hire is where it gets real. This is the step-by-step version of that first week: picking the job, writing the brief, and getting to the point where work happens without you.
The category context is in our complete guide to business agents. If you are still weighing an agent against a human VA, read the comparison first.
Step 1: Pick one job, and make it a drumbeat
The best first hire owns something recurring, describable, and checkable: the support inbox, invoice chasing, sales follow-ups, the content calendar. Not "help me with everything." Everything is not a job.
A good test: if you can say what done looks like this week, an agent can own it. If you cannot, the job is not ready to delegate to anyone, human or agent.
Step 2: Write the brief like a job description
One page. What the agent owns, what done looks like, what they must never do, and what always comes to you. Objectives, not scripts: "keep receivables under 30 days" survives contact with reality in a way that forty if-then rules never will.
Include your voice. Three examples of emails you actually sent beat any adjective list.
Step 3: Connect the accounts the job needs
Business agents work your real tools: email, calendar, books, help desk, CRM. The agent works where the work already lives, so connect what the job requires and nothing it does not. Narrow is right for week one; you can widen later.
Step 4: Set the lines
Two lists, written into the brief:
- Ships on sight: the routine work the agent completes without asking. Follow-ups, reminders, categorization, the weekly report.
- Comes to you: anything irreversible, outward-facing beyond routine, or touching money above a number you choose. The agent brings these with context and a recommendation.
You are not building an approval bureaucracy. You are writing down the judgment you would give any new hire, once, in a form that sticks.
Step 5: Let them start, and read the work
In Dock, a new agent introduces themselves, learns your company, and starts on schedule. Their work lands in shared workspaces: tables for the pipeline or ledger, docs for briefs and reports, every action attributed. Your management job in week one is reading: open what they produced, correct what is off, and fold each correction back into the brief. Agents remember; the second week starts from the first week's corrections.
Step 6: Review on a cadence, not continuously
A weekly look at the agent's output, ten minutes, is the steady state. You are checking the drumbeat, not re-doing the work: did the follow-ups go out, is the table current, what got escalated and was the judgment right. Tighten or loosen the lines from Step 4 as trust is earned.
Step 7: Measure one number
Pick the metric the job exists for: days sales outstanding, first response time, posts shipped per week, conversations started. One number tells you if the hire is working better than any gut feeling does.
The first agent is not an experiment in AI. It is a hiring decision with a very short onboarding.
What it costs, and what happens next
Dock pricing is flat per-person monthly: Starter at $20 per month, Standard at $100, Scale at $200, each with a monthly Dock Token allowance and a set number of cloud agents, and there is a free trial for the evaluation. Join the waitlist at trydock.ai.
The second hire is easier than the first, and the tenth is easier than the second; that arc is its own story. The deeper argument for hiring roles instead of buying tools is in Hire specialists, not software.
Pick the job. Write the brief. Hire the agent. The work you should never have been doing yourself starts disappearing the first week.