The most important word in agentic AI right now might also be the most misleading: “skill.”
A skill isn’t a capability the AI has. It’s a workflow you’ve documented so something else can run it.
I built one last week that turns a 90-minute Monday morning report into a five-minute one. Pulls the data, runs the math, formats the deck, drafts the talking points. Done before I’m on my second coffee.
It works because I sat down and wrote, in plain English, exactly how I’d build that report if I were doing it myself. Where to look. What to count. What “stale” means in this context. Which exceptions to flag and which to ignore. How to structure the executive summary so it doesn’t bury the lead.
That document is the skill. The model just runs it.
This is the piece most enterprise AI strategies are missing. The bottleneck isn’t model access, compute, or even data. The bottleneck is that most organizations have never written down how their work actually gets done.
The expertise lives in three people’s heads, and one of them is retiring in March.
You can’t automate a workflow nobody has articulated.
So the real prep for agentic AI isn’t a procurement decision. It’s a documentation problem. Pick the five workflows you’d most want to delegate, and start by writing them out — not for the AI, for yourself. The skill comes after.
The unglamorous part of agentic AI: half the work is writing down what you already know how to do.