Resource note
Resources / AI Business Systems
A chat assistant can help draft or summarize a task when a person provides the prompt and checks the result. An integrated workflow connects AI to recurring business steps, data, or systems. That connection can add value, but it also creates new questions about access, reliability, and responsibility.
Check the workflow before building an integration
- **Purpose:** What decision or task should change, and how will you tell?
- **Data:** Which records are needed? Are they current, authorized for this use, and appropriate for the selected tool?
- **Access:** What systems can the model or agent read or change? Can access be limited to the task?
- **Review:** Which outputs require a person to approve, correct, or reject them?
- **Exceptions:** What happens when the model is uncertain, a source is missing, or an integration fails?
- **Operations:** Who monitors changes, handles incidents, and turns the workflow off?
Example
A person drafting a response in a chat window can check the source and choose whether to send it. A connected workflow that reads customer records and drafts replies also needs rules for which records it may access, how staff review drafts, where corrections are recorded, and how the connection is paused if it behaves unexpectedly.
When the simpler tool is enough
If a task is occasional, uses no sensitive information, and a person reviews each result, a stand-alone tool may be sufficient. An integration is not automatically better. Consider it when the task repeats, needs authorized data connections, or has a clear owner and review path.
This checklist is not an architecture design or security assessment. For a proposed production use, validate the vendor terms, data boundaries, access controls, and failure behavior before connecting systems.