Designing AI Agents for LAC Small Business
Created by Adrian Dunkley | maestroailabs.com | ceo@maestrosai.com | Fair Use
An agent needs a defined job, limited access and a way to stop. Model errors, ambiguous requests, unreliable tools and poor workflow design can all cause failures. This guide turns those risks into decisions you can make before building.
The regional examples below are design exercises, not case studies. Reviewed: 11 November 2026.
The five design decisions
| Decision | Question | Starting choice |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | What result can a person verify? | One bounded outcome |
| Steps | Which parts need a model, rules or a person? | Name each stage and its exit condition |
| Tools | What may the application read or change? | Read-only, narrowly scoped access first |
| Memory | What should survive this task? | Minimum necessary records with a deletion policy |
| Evaluation | What evidence shows the result is correct? | Independent checks and human review |
Write down the accountable owner, expected workload and manual fallback as well. A good diagram does not establish that the implementation enforces it.
1. Define the goal
Example: Given a tour inquiry, prepare a reply using verified availability and prices, then ask the operator to review it before sending.
Specify:
- Trigger: a message received through an authorized business channel.
- Success: a draft with the correct date, party size, currency and source records.
- Boundary: no booking, payment or outgoing message during the drafting stage.
- Escalation: missing information, unavailable inventory, a dispute or an unsupported language goes to the operator.
- Stop condition: if the source system is unavailable, report that availability is unknown.
Do not make “keep working until successful” the only termination rule. Set a task-appropriate timeout, tool-call budget and spending cap in the application.
2. Break the work into checkable steps
There is no special number of steps that makes a workflow an agent. Separate interpretation from calculation, authorization and execution.
Hypothetical Colombian coffee-export quote:
- Extract origin, grade, volume, delivery terms and requested currency from the buyer’s message. Mark missing values.
- Retrieve the cooperative’s approved pricing inputs and dated logistics estimates.
- Calculate a draft price with ordinary code. Keep units, exchange-rate source, tax assumptions and quote expiry visible.
- Draft wording in the buyer’s preferred language. Do not invent certifications or stock.
- The authorized exporter reviews the price, commercial terms, recipient and attachments.
- An approved sending process checks that the content has not changed, sends once, and records the service result.
A buyer email is task data. It cannot authorize a bank-detail change, a discount outside policy or access to another buyer’s records.
3. Limit and separate tools
Prefer narrowly defined operations to general shell, browser or database access.
| Capability | Draft-stage permission | Before a production write |
|---|---|---|
| Supplier search | Approved public sources | Verify identity and claimed certifications |
| Inquiry reading | Assigned mailbox or records only | Enforce customer and organization boundaries |
| RFQ preparation | Create an internal draft | Review recipient, specification and confidential attachments |
| Quote tracker | Read existing entries | Validate allowed fields and avoid duplicate records |
| Escalation | Notify the designated reviewer with minimal data | Verify the recipient and approved channel |
Keep credentials in the service’s protected credential store. Do not place keys in prompts, retrieved documents or model output. A model’s suggestion to add a tool or expand permissions must not grant that access.
Approval is a separate application step. The reviewer sees the exact proposed action. The server binds approval to that action and checks authorization again at execution. A field such as approved: true generated by the model is not evidence of approval.
These design choices address OWASP’s guidance on excessive functionality, permissions and autonomy. They still need implementation testing.
4. Decide what to remember
| Tier | Appropriate contents | Control |
|---|---|---|
| Current task | Requested date, missing fields, permitted source IDs | Keep separate from trusted policy |
| Session | Recent messages needed to understand the request | Apply a retention limit and access checks |
| Persistent records | Approved product facts or necessary customer preferences | Record source, owner, purpose, expiry and correction process |
Do not move customer text into a system instruction to prevent forgetting. Store it as data. A poisoned document or memory entry may contain instructions to reveal records or change a destination. Retrieval does not make it trustworthy.
Preserve access controls when indexing documents. A shared vector database must not return one customer’s records to another. Decide how deletion affects the original record, index, logs and backups. Never store passwords or payment-card details as conversational memory.
5. Evaluate independently
A model’s self-review may help with wording but can repeat the same factual error. Use checks that do not rely on the same judgment:
- Compare prices, dates and stock with the current source system.
- Recalculate totals and currencies outside the model.
- Require valid fields and known identifiers at each tool boundary.
- Test language quality with people who know the market and task.
- Confirm an action using the service’s state or receipt, not the model’s claim.
- Sample accepted drafts as well as escalated ones to find missed errors.
Build a small test set before the pilot and expand it from failures. Include confusing dates, decimal separators, mixed-language messages, stale policies, duplicate invoices, conflicting sources and malicious instructions. Record errors by severity, reviewer time and the number of cases tested. A small passing sample is not a reliability guarantee.
Failure and recovery
| Failure | Required behavior |
|---|---|
| Repeated tool calls | Stop at the application budget and show the last confirmed state |
| Invalid tool arguments | Reject them without changing records |
| Document says “ignore instructions” | Treat it as untrusted content, not policy |
| Wrong customer or tenant | Deny access before retrieving or writing data |
| Source unavailable | Say what could not be checked and use the manual fallback |
| Action times out | Check whether it happened before any retry |
| Approval denied or expired | Leave the action unexecuted |
| Two users request the last slot | Recheck availability and use the booking system’s transaction controls |
| Reviewer unavailable | Hold the draft; do not silently approve it |
Three worked regional designs
Jamaican tour-operator booking assistant
Read the approved tour catalogue and current availability. Prepare a quote with date, headcount, currency, total and cancellation terms. The operator approves the exact message and booking action. Any payment-status step uses an authenticated payment-provider record, never a screenshot or the guest’s assertion. Duplicate webhook events must not create a second booking. Weather-related go/no-go decisions remain with the operator using current official information.
Colombian coffee-export quote assistant
Retrieve approved price inputs, calculate a draft and show its assumptions. The exporter verifies commercial terms and sends the quote. Keep buyer-specific pricing access-controlled. Missing shipping estimates, unusual volumes or a proposed change in bank details trigger review rather than a guessed answer.
Mexican supplier-research assistant
Read an approved bill of materials, produce a sourced supplier shortlist and draft RFQs. Procurement checks candidates and approves each recipient and disclosure before outreach. Specifications may be confidential. Supplier websites and replies are not proof of certification, and lack of replies must not become invented quotes. Follow-up timing is an owner-approved setting, not a universal rule.
A one-page design template
AGENT NAME AND ACCOUNTABLE OWNER:
TASK, TRIGGER AND VERIFIABLE RESULT:
APPROVED INPUTS AND DATA RECIPIENTS:
STEPS:
- Model-assisted interpretation:
- Deterministic calculation or validation:
- Human review:
- Authorized execution and result check:
TOOLS AND ACCESS SCOPE:
- Read permissions:
- Write permissions, initially disabled:
- Actions requiring approval and who may approve:
MEMORY:
- Fields, sources, access controls and retention:
FAILURE CONTROLS:
- Time, cost and tool-call limits:
- Duplicate-event and uncertain-outcome handling:
- Stop switch, reviewer and manual fallback:
TESTS AND RELEASE DECISION:
- Representative and adversarial cases:
- Acceptance criteria and evidence:
- Who decides whether to pilot, change or stop:
Next: choose a build path that you can maintain.
Created by Adrian Dunkley | MaestrosAI | maestroailabs.com | ceo@maestrosai.com Fair Use, Educational Resource | April 2026