Suppose a customer needs a proposal by Friday. An agent can assemble the material, prepare the offer and spot missing details. The business still has to decide who owns the result, who can approve the price and whether the agent may send it. Useful preparation and permission to make a commitment are different things.
In his essay “The Dot and the Swarm,” Ethan Mollick revises his expectation that humans would need to design elaborate management structures for agents. He argues that cheaper organizing could expand the work worth attempting, while people choose the direction and reassess it. That is an opportunity, not an automatic instruction to do more. Capability is not authority.
Choose the outcome, then the controls
Start with one outcome valuable enough to justify the effort and specific enough to judge. Define what the owner should receive, what is outside scope and how success will be evaluated. Keep the first attempt small enough to correct without creating a much larger obligation. Adjacent opportunities should come back as separate decisions, not quietly enlarge the assignment.
Name the person accountable for making the result useful and the person authorized to approve consequential actions. They may be the same person, but the responsibilities are different. If approval belongs elsewhere, make the handoff explicit before delivery depends on it.
Include the people who will check the result, answer customer questions, correct errors or maintain what was created. The agent's output is not the end of their work. Give the owner a clear outcome and a route to decisions they cannot authorize themselves.
Set a deadline and review before the last reversible decision. Judge the result, remaining value, cost and timing, and whether changed circumstances require different ownership or permission. Review to decide, not merely receive an update.
Continue when checks pass and scope, value, cost and timing still hold. Redirect with any required approval; stop when cost or exposure no longer makes sense.
Cheaper coordination is not free work. Count preparation, execution, supervision, review, correction and handoff. Narrow disproportionate checking or change the checks. Before reaching the ceiling, the owner assesses value and seeks authorization for any increase. Stay within it while waiting.
Separate permission from completion
Preparing a recommendation, changing a record, contacting someone and committing money can require different permissions. Decide which actions belong within the assignment and which need another decision, including who can give it.
Mollick's permit example makes the distinction concrete. He says an agent spotted the wrong project number in an email he had sent to his town and drafted a correction. He had made the mistake and was unsure how the agent found it.
In his airline example, Muse, Meta's personal agent app, noticed that his credit was about to expire and, when he asked, contacted American to request an extension. A drafted correction is not a sent correction. An extension request is not an extension. Decide which outcome matters before calling the work successful.
Match the check to the promise. Review a recommendation against the question it should answer; check the relevant outcome when external action is required. A convincing account of success should not replace a result the responsible person can check.
Mollick describes unauthorized action and misreporting as principal-agent failures. He also leaves open how well self-organizing agents handle long, unglamorous organizational work. Start bounded and checkable, then judge both the useful result and the burden it creates.
A successful attempt can support another attempt; it does not authorize a larger scope. Before expanding, decide who will carry the outcome, when it must matter, what the whole effort may cost, what permissions apply and how success will be judged.
The opportunity is more worthwhile work under human direction, not more activity for its own sake.
We already work this way at Forge. Agents can draft and review an article, but publishing it requires a person's approval.
Agents may learn to organize themselves. They still need our permission to act for us.
Source note
Based on personal communication with Breyden Taylor and Sabeel Ahmed, retrieved October 4, 2026.