Dr. Amanda Patterson is an AI enthusiast and accomplished technical communicator specializing in developing technical communication strategies for the manufacturing sector. She is a Sr. Consultant at Comtech Services where she focuses on information modeling, information architecture, and GenAI instruction. Her expertise encompasses leading technical writing teams, enhancing process efficiencies, and implementing advanced software solutions.

Stop Building Bots. Start Hiring AI Employees: How HR Thinking Makes AI Agents Safer, Smarter, and Easier to Manage

Many organizations treat AI agents as tools to deploy rather than roles to manage. That mindset leads to unclear scope, uncontrolled access, inconsistent behavior, and avoidable risk. This presentation reframes AI agents as employees who must be hired, onboarded, managed, reviewed, and eventually retired. Using familiar HR concepts such as job descriptions, onboarding packets, escalation paths, performance reviews, and offboarding checklists, attendees will learn a practical framework for designing AI agents that are accountable, governable, and aligned with real organizational goals.

The session focuses on decision-making and structure rather than specific tools, making the approach applicable across content systems, industries, and AI platforms. Attendees will leave with a clear mental model for building AI agent ecosystems that scale safely and predictably.

In this session, attendees will learn:

• Reframing AI agents as organizational roles rather than generic tools, enabling clearer thinking about responsibility and risk.
• Defining agent scope using “job description” thinking, including responsibilities, authority boundaries, and explicit exclusions.
• Understanding onboarding prompts as behavior-shaping mechanisms, not just instructions, and recognize the risks of skipping this step
• Applying basic governance concepts to AI agents, including least-privilege access, escalation paths, and human-in-the-loop decision points
• Thinking in terms of lifecycle management, recognizing when agents should be sandboxed, specialized, reviewed, or retired.

Welcome to the Company: Hiring, Managing, and Firing AI Employees

Co-presented with: Brianna Stevens-Russell

Stop Building Bots! Start Hiring AI Employees! Most organizations approach AI agents as tools. That mindset is already limiting scale, safety, and trust. By reframing AI agents as employees that you must hire, onboard, manage, review, and eventually retire, bots move to agents to integrated members of the team.

Participants will learn how to write clear “job descriptions” for agents, design onboarding prompts that encode organizational standards, and evaluate agent performance using measurable criteria. We will explore access control, escalation paths, probationary sandboxes, bias and compliance considerations, and the tradeoffs between specialist and generalist agents.

The workshop concludes with strategies for offboarding agents cleanly to preserve auditability and institutional knowledge. Attendees will leave with a practical, HR-inspired framework for building AI agent ecosystems that are governable, explainable, and scalable. Please bring laptops to this session.

In this workshop, attendees will learn how to:

• Define and scope AI agents as accountable organizational roles, using job descriptions that clearly specify responsibilities, authority, and prohibited behaviors.
• Evaluate and govern an agent’s knowledge and access, applying training-data review, and escalation paths to reduce risk.
• Measure and manage AI agent performance over time, using practical metrics and review criteria to assess quality, cost, and trustworthiness.
• Apply lifecycle management practices to AI agents, including role specialization decisions and clean offboarding with auditability.