Every company I talk to this year is "hiring" the same intern. It has read the entire internet, speaks forty languages, works around the clock and costs less per hour than the office coffee. It is also, on day one, completely ignorant of the only thing that matters: how your business actually works.
Which vendor do we never use again and why. What "rush" means on a Friday versus a Tuesday. Why invoice #4471 is different. The stuff that lives in the heads of your two most tired employees.
The onboarding nobody does
When I ran the knowledge base at Liberty Mutual — 200+ processes, 3,000+ users — the unglamorous truth was that documentation quality determined automation quality, one to one. Sixteen years later the tooling changed and that rule didn't. An agent grounded in stale, vague or contradictory process docs will do the wrong thing with magnificent confidence.
So onboard the robot like a hire you're serious about. Write the SOPs it will read — not aspirational corporate prose, but the real rules with the real exceptions. Give it the org chart of systems: what's the source of truth for customers, for pricing, for inventory. Tell it what it's not allowed to touch, and enforce that with a gate, not a suggestion.
The upside of taking this seriously
At the bakery I documented 40 SOPs mostly for humans, and years later that same discipline is what makes businesses agent-ready. Companies that wrote things down are onboarding robots in a weekend. Companies that ran on tribal knowledge are discovering the tribe has to write its memoirs first.
The intern is brilliant. The intern is eager. The intern will absolutely file your taxes in the wrong country if the binder says to. Write the binder.
Hot take from someone who's onboarded both: the robot reads the SOPs. That alone puts it ahead of half my former coworkers.