Weekly newsletter highlighting the latest AI news, with short video tutorials and copy/paste prompts you can use to improve your skills as an AI operator. As artificial intelligence moves from optional to operational, technical specialists no longer have the advantage. It is those who can supervise and coach AI to improve that will thrive in an AI-augmented future.
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The SAGE Framework turns a repeated task into an AI Agent
Published 20 days ago • 4 min read
🏎️ “AI agents don’t have a speed limit, but the person managing them still does.” - Kieran Klaasen
Hello Reader,
The fastest way to build a disappointing AI agent is to begin with a vague, grand ambition.
“Handle my marketing for me.”
“Run all our customer service.”
“Become my chief of staff.”
Those are only aspirations, not workflows. An agent cannot reliably operate within a fog bank. A useful agent starts with clear goals:
Turn this meeting transcript into decisions, owners, deadlines, and unresolved questions
Review incoming enquiries, classify them, draft a response, and escalate the risky ones to my personal email
Gather material from these approved sources, create a first draft of a presentation, and flag any unsupported claims
Compare a published asset with an evaluation checklist, identify gaps, and ask for missing information
When I develop AI agents in New Zealand for clients, I use the same 4-step process I teach in the AI Agent Accelerator. It's called the SAGE Framework, and it stands for: Scope, Automate, Generate, Evaluate.
1. Scope Agentic Tasks
Choose one workflow worth improving.
Projects fail when they aim too wide. By defining a narrow scope, you’ll learn how to identify agent-ready workflows, break them into steps, define success criteria, and decide where human review belongs.
A strong scope is narrow enough to test and valuable enough to matter.
2. Automate Your Workflows
Break the workflow into handovers.
Each tool connected to your systems creates another point of failure. Mapping each input, action, tool, handoff, and deliverable will create an automation map that allows you to debug individual steps.
Automation is a series of design decisions.
3. Generate System Prompts
Engineer agent instructions.
You want to give the agent enough context to produce good results without your active involvement. That means your instructions, skills, examples, and SOPs have to be fit for purpose.
Durable system prompts define success.
4. Evaluate Agent Performance
Test the output before you trust the workflow.
An agent becomes useful when you can tell the difference between a good result and a plausible-looking mistake. Building a simple evaluation can process to test outputs, spot failure points, reduce risk, and improve agent reliability over time.
Measure what matters.
This is the process I am teaching starting this Thursday, 10-11:30am, at EPIC Innovation for the next 8 weeks.
Last Call for the AI Agent Accelerator
If you'd like to join me in this live, in-person 8-workshops series in downtown Christchurch, click here. (Newsletter subscribers get 25% off.)
If you'd like to have a conversation about hosting these workshops in-house with your team, click here.
🎬 [REPLAY] Human-First AI: Find the Work that Matters Most
OpenAI's Dev Day announced the release of Dots (it's like Grok Bot) ChatGPT Space (it's like Google Drive) and GPT-6.1 Sol (it'a like Astra but cheaper token cost)
Anthropic launched Claude Marketplace to organise connectors, plugins, and partner apps
Viral AI Agent Instinct raised $1B at $10B valuation
The World is Changing: AI For Creativity by Jeffrey Katzenberg - “Technology didn't diminish the craft, it expanded the canvas. It gave artists more room to create.”
My AI Doom Scenario by Hunter Ash - "Speed of change is the only defense against parasitism, control, decay. Change so fast that they can’t keep up. AI will either end the evil dream of centralized control once and for all, or, if the controllers manage to capture AI, cement it for all time. Hence, acceleration."
📢 Feedback Time!
If I were to attend an 8-webinar series for the AI Agent Accelerator, I would prefer:
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AI Coaching Newsletter
by Caelan Huntress
Weekly newsletter highlighting the latest AI news, with short video tutorials and copy/paste prompts you can use to improve your skills as an AI operator. As artificial intelligence moves from optional to operational, technical specialists no longer have the advantage. It is those who can supervise and coach AI to improve that will thrive in an AI-augmented future.
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