Automate Enterprise Operations
The operations you already run as workflows can be handed to agents one step at a time, and the workflow stays in charge.
Enterprises do not lack automation. They lack automation that can handle the step in the middle that needs judgement: the incident that is not quite any runbook, the ticket that needs three systems read before it can be routed, the close that stalls on one reconciliation nobody can explain. Those steps go to a human queue, and the queue is where the process waits.
Lightspeed’s proposition is narrow and, for that reason, deployable: keep the process, and hand the judgement step to an agent the process owns.
The workflow owns the agent
If you run Temporal, you already have the orchestration. A workflow starts a managed session, declares the tools the agent may use, sets a deadline, and waits for a result. The tools are your own activities, bound through one generic protocol: a lookup in the ticketing system, a query against the warehouse, a call to the payments API. Lightspeed delivers the tool calls to your workflow, waits for the results, handles timeouts and cancels work; your activities stay yours. Results come back as durable emissions with keyed completions, so the workflow waits for exactly the answer it asked for and nothing else. The bindings are immutable: the agent cannot grant itself a tool the workflow did not declare.
There is no separate agent infrastructure to run. The agent is a step in the workflow, with the workflow’s retries, history and observability around it.
The on-call step
An alert fires. The incident workflow starts a managed session and binds three tools: read the dashboards over MCP, inspect the affected host through the environment daemon, and propose a change. The agent reads, inspects, and proposes a fix with a deadline. The proposal lands in the incident channel with what it found and why. An engineer approves and the workflow applies it; or nobody answers in fifteen minutes and the workflow cancels the session cleanly, in-flight calls aborted, and escalates to the next rota. The incident record is the workflow’s history plus the agent’s event log: what it read, what it concluded, who approved.
The routing step
A ticket arrives that no rule matches. The workflow starts a session with read-only tools over the CRM, the order system and the knowledge base. The agent reads the three, decides the queue, drafts the reply, and emits a completion the workflow routes on. Volume is not a concern: a thousand tickets a day are a thousand short sessions, each a workflow, none of them a machine.
The close step
A reconciliation does not balance. The workflow starts a session with a machine attached: the agent queries both ledgers, finds the batch that posted twice, writes the adjustment as a proposal, and hands back. The controller who approves sees the query, the rows and the reasoning, not a chat.
Steps that recur
Some operations are not events but rhythms: the nightly check, the weekly report, the monthly access review. Those belong to a resident agent with a schedule trigger, which is the subject of Deploy Resident Agents. The mechanism is the same managed session; the difference is who wakes it.
Why the judgement step is now safe to automate
Three things made the middle step a human step: it needed access to real systems, it needed to be stopped if it went wrong, and it needed to be explained afterwards. Lightspeed answers each structurally. Access is through tools the workflow declared and credentials the model never sees. Stopping is a cancel that aborts in-flight calls without a farewell turn, or a deadline that fires on its own. Explanation is the event log, which records what the agent was shown and what it decided, replayable exactly.
Getting to the first step
Pick one process with one judgement step. Bind the two or three activities that step needs. Set a deadline. Run it with the human still approving. When the approvals stop changing anything, let the workflow apply the result. Then pick the next step. The process never changed; one step at a time, it stopped waiting.
Rests on: managed sessions, workflow-backed tools, the generic workflow-tool protocol, deadlines and cancellation, hosted MCP, environment process tools, channels, the typed JSON-RPC API and TypeScript client.