An AI Agent Team for the SOC: Skills, Mandates and Containment

All courses / AI Blue / Module 3 / Chapter 13

Learning objectives

After the lesson the participant can:

Explain why Hansa Mutual staffs four agents and a critique agent but neither a response agent nor a manager agent
Describe the contents of a mandate manifest and the four identity rules for SOC agents
Plan the introduction of an agent in four steps with a decision and exit criteria for each
Design the degraded states and the retirement sequence for an agent

Key concepts

Mandate manifest: The SOC's written mandate for an agent, identified as MND-*: purpose, permitted tasks, the level per action class, who approves, the budget, the escalation rules and the list of what the agent may never do. The platform enforces it outside the agent.
Conductor: The named human, at Hansa Mutual the group SOC lead, who answers for the agent team as a whole: that the sum of delegations is known, measured and stoppable.
Deterministic pipeline: The orchestration in which an event arrives, a rule selects the agent, the agent writes a structured result to the case and the next rule selects the next step. No agent assigns work to another or approves another's output.
Circuit breaker: A limit that lowers an agent's level automatically, without waiting for a meeting. For example, a sampled closure that proves to be an escape drops that class from Level 3 to Level 2 until the class owner reviews it.
Degraded mode: The ability to work without the agents. Four states are planned: class paused, agent stopped, team stopped and platform down, each with a runbook step, an owner and a target time.

Interactive exercises

Do them here and get feedback at once. Choose a card and then where it belongs, or drag it.

Interactive exercise 1 · Put in order

Retiring an agent

Retirement follows a fixed order in the chapter. Put the seven steps in that order.

Interactive exercise 2 · Match

Who answers for what in the chain

Match each link in the chain of accountability for Hansa Mutual's agent team with what that link answers for.

Teaching plan

15 min	Teacher presents the table of five candidate roles and the reasons for treating enrichment as a skill and containment as a playbook run by the SOAR layer.
15 min	Reading of MND-HM-SOC-02: participants locate the identity settings, the Level 3 actions tied to playbooks and the never-do list.
15 min	Accountability walk: for one closure and one isolation, the class traces the chain of named people link by link.
40 min	Exercise: groups write a mandate manifest and a four-step introduction plan for one agent or assistant.
20 min	Tabletop on degraded mode and retirement: the teacher announces 'team stopped' and groups state what the SOC does in the first 15 minutes.

Discussion

The Five Eyes guidance recommends a secondary agent to validate tasks, yet the SOC departs from it for approval. What is the argument, and where would you still use a second agent?
The detection-drafting agent holds a Mode 5 identity although it only drafts. What does recording the true mode protect against?
The chapter concludes that an agent team is acceptable to the extent that a person who does not depend on it can stop it and the people left can still do the work. How would you test both halves?

Written exercise

Exercise · 40 minutes

A mandate manifest and a four-step introduction

Choose one agent your SOC might introduce, or Nordvik Region's triage assistant NR-SEC-001, which the chapter governs with MND-NR-SOC-01. Write the mandate manifest: purpose, usage mode, functions, owner, operators, authority, data it may read and where models run, the level per action class with the playbook that bounds any Level 3 action, the budget, the escalation rules, the personal-data entry with team-level reporting and the list of what it may never do. Then plan the introduction in four steps from shadow mode at Level 0 Advisory to Level 3 Bounded for one named class, with duration, evidence and exit criteria per step. For Nordvik, keep Level 1 as the ceiling.

Deliverable: A mandate manifest and a four-step introduction plan with a recorded decision, evidence and exit criteria for each step.

Your work

Self-test

Choose an answer to see whether it is right, or open the answer below each question.

Why does the SOC in the chapter not build a manager agent to oversee the other agents?
Show the answer
B. Because overseeing the last step is not overseeing the chain, and approval is a human act
The SOC orchestrates with a deterministic pipeline. No agent approves another agent's output, since agents on one model family can fail in correlated ways, and the summary notes that overseeing the last step is not overseeing the chain.
What is the first step of introducing a SOC agent in the practical guide?
Show the answer
C. Shadow mode at Level 0 Advisory for four weeks, with no effect on the queue
Step 1 is shadow mode at Level 0 Advisory for four weeks: the agent runs on live alerts with no effect and its verdicts are compared with the analysts' own.
Where does the mechanism for stopping the whole agent team sit?
Show the answer
A. At the identity provider and the SOAR connector, outside the agent platform
The mechanism sits at the identity provider and the SOAR connector, not in the agent platform, so a compromised or confused platform cannot refuse it.