An AI Agent Team for Operations: Skills, Mandates and Containment

All courses / AI Operations / Module 4 / Chapter 16

Learning objectives

After the lesson the participant can:

Describe the six roles of an operations agent team and what each role never does
Explain why skills carry instruction and the mandate manifest carries authority
Specify the containment controls that hold whatever the agent's behaviour
Draft a mandate manifest for a runbook-runner agent with promotion and demotion rules

Key concepts

Team of narrow agents: A small set of agents divided along the lines that already separate duties in operations, each with a role, an identity, an owner and a mandate, so that a fault in one is bounded by its mandate and its result can be verified independently.
Skills as versioned files: The unit in which an agent's procedural knowledge is packaged. Skills are code: reviewed by a person other than the author, owned, pinned and released as change. They carry instruction and never authority.
Mandate manifest: The MND record that states what an agent may do, where, when and with what: identity, scope, the degree of delegation per action class, budgets, circuit breakers, separation and never lists, memory, tools, evidence and review. A policy decision point outside the agent enforces it.
Runbook runner: The only role that touches production on a routine basis. It executes catalogued runbooks inside a mandate, dry-run first, and reports what it did; it never writes or edits runbooks, widens its own scope or verifies its own result.
Promotion and demotion: A rise in level is a recorded decision by a named authority on four kinds of evidence no older than 90 days: offline evaluation, a shadow period, a seeded-fault exercise and a drilled stop. Lowering is immediate, and a spent autonomy budget demotes the class one level.

Interactive exercises

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

Interactive exercise 1 · Match

Six roles of an operations agent team

Match each role of the agent team with what it does, as the chapter's table of roles states.

Interactive exercise 2 · Scenario

A proposal to raise a level

Apply the chapter's rules on promotion.

Teaching plan

15 min	The teacher contrasts a single general agent holding the union of every permission with a team of narrow agents, and presents the six roles with outputs and recipients.
15 min	Participants take the table of what each role never does and explain, for the observer and the runbook runner, which separation of duty the prohibition protects.
20 min	Walk through the manifest MND-NR-OPS-003 and the containment controls: identity, credentials, policy decision point, sandbox and egress, rate limits and breakers, kill switch.
10 min	Input on agents and state engines: the proposal as preferred path, the narrow list of direct actions, and why a read-only switch in a tool server is a convenience and not the hard limit.
35 min	Exercise: participants write a mandate manifest for a runbook-runner agent.
10 min	Debrief comparing Nordvik Region's three roles at a ceiling of Level 2 with Hansa Mutual's six roles and bounded Level 3 for the runner.

Discussion

Nordvik Region holds that a manifest it cannot review is a manifest it does not adopt, and keeps manifests short enough to review in an afternoon. What would that rule exclude in your organisation?
The chapter says the hard limit on a tool server is the permission of the identity behind it, not the server's read-only flag. Where do your own tools rely on a setting that the tool itself could change?
The people on the other side of the agents keep their craft through manual practice that the mandate itself requires. How would you write that requirement so that it is actually exercised?

Written exercise

Exercise · 35 minutes

A mandate manifest for a runbook runner

Write the smallest mandate that makes a runbook-runner agent useful on one service, yours or Nordvik Region's portal SVC-NR-002. Start from the most frequent catalogued runbooks, never from the agent's capabilities, and list at most three. State the agent's workload identity, owner, operators and the authority that approves a change of level; the scope; the level per action class with the approval rule; the budget and circuit breakers; the never list; memory and the tool allowlist with declared effects; what can be undone and who can stop it; and the evidence and review date. Add the test that shows the policy decision point refuses an action outside the mandate.

Deliverable: A mandate manifest of one to two pages with identity, scope, levels per class, budgets, never list, tools, stop holders, review date and a refusal test.

Your work

Self-test

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

Which of these does the runbook runner never do, according to the table of roles?
Show the answer
D. Verify its own result
The runner never writes or edits runbooks, widens its own scope or verifies its own result. Verification belongs to something independent of the actor, which is the observer principle applied to the team.
Why may Hansa Mutual's IT-operations agent renew a certificate at Level 3 Bounded when other configuration change stays at Level 2?
Show the answer
B. The previous certificate stays valid until expiry, so the renewal is reversible by reinstalling it
The chapter permits this one reconfiguration at Level 3 because it is narrow and reversible: the old certificate remains valid and can be reinstalled. The ceiling follows reversibility, as Chapter 4 requires.
What does the chapter say about the difference between instructions in a skill and boundaries in a mandate?
Show the answer
A. Instructions lower the rate of unwanted behaviour, but only boundaries set a ceiling on its consequences
The chapter calls this the most important distinction: a skill is instruction and never authority. Authority and its limits come from the mandate manifest that a policy decision point outside the agent enforces.