Course recap, six mental models to keep, cheat tables, and the certification path. Print it — it's your take-home reference.
Every agent is this loop. It reads inputs, decides over multiple steps, then does something — and repeats. A chatbot stops at "reason"; an agent closes the loop with action.
Assisted → Workflow-automation → Partial → Full. The higher the stakes (client money, compliance, regulatory reporting), the lower the autonomy and the firmer the human gate. Finance earns its trust slowly.
Chaining (do it in order) · Routing (send it the right way) · Parallelisation (do many at once) · Orchestration (a coordinator spawns sub-agents). Name the pattern before you build.
Space (the kitchen) → Chat Agent (the recipe) → Flow/Schedule (the doorbell) → MCP (the oven). 80% of value lives in the first two layers.
Named "never do" rules, human-in-the-loop triggers, traceable numbers, and an audit trail. Flag-only beats auto-decide for anything an auditor or regulator will inspect.
When an agent misses something, don't fix it in-chat — add the rule to the agent definition. The agent gets smarter for everyone on the next run.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Space | Container holding documents and scoping an agent's knowledge — "the kitchen" |
| Chat Agent | A saved, reusable prompt configuration with persona, instructions, knowledge, actions, and suggested prompts — "the recipe" |
| Flow | A no-code, multi-step wrapper around one or more Chat Agents, schedulable and shareable — "the doorbell" |
| MCP Connector | Model Context Protocol integration giving an agent live tool access to external systems — "the oven" |
| Quick Research | An AI-led, multi-step investigation feature that produces a cited report |
| Pilot Canvas | The capstone deliverable — a structured one-pager describing a proposed real agentic pilot, scored on autonomy/tools/guardrails/impact |
| Rule of Three | Heuristic: typed the same prompt 3 times → save it as an agent |
| Ghost Agent | A failure mode — an agent built once, shared, then silently abandoned/never updated |
| Audit-Defensibility | The finance-specific design pattern: named output sections, traceable numbers, flag-only behavior, cited sources |
| Break (reconciliation) | A line item where two records (e.g., GL and bank statement) don't match |
| NCR-style triage | Borrowed term from manufacturing quality processes — classifying and routing an exception for review, never auto-resolving it |
| Need | Use |
|---|---|
| Answer a policy question with citations, repeatedly | Chat Agent |
| Run the same multi-step process on a schedule | Flow |
| One-off deep investigation with cited sources | Quick Research |
| Connect to a real system (core banking, market data) | MCP Connector |
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