You would never let a new employee approve claims on day one. No training, no playbook, no manager. But most companies are doing exactly that with AI agents.
The results show it. PwC’s AI Agent Survey found 75% of companies plan to raise AI budgets this year because of agentic AI, yet only 12% of CEOs have used AI to increase revenue while decreasing cost, and 63% say their agents need more human supervision than expected.
The instinct is to blame the model and swap it for the next release. But agents fail the way a smart new hire with no onboarding fails. Your agents don’t know your business, and you don’t know your agents. That gap is why the spending isn’t paying off.
Feed agents mined process reality, so they decide the way your best work actually flows. Mine their execution logs so you can see, prove, and cut what they cost. Your agents are workforce. Manage them like workforce. Onboard them. Review them.
Onboarding: Teach agents how the business actually works
Every enterprise runs two versions of its processes, the documented one and the real one. Process mining reads system event logs and shows how work actually flows, with the variants, rework, and bottlenecks nobody designed. Task mining shows how people complete that work at the desktop.
That mined reality is the context an agent needs. Think of it as the map of your territory: you would hand it to any new hire, because right now your agents are traveling without it. One U.S. insurer found through task mining that 20% of its long-running calls skipped an available pre-authorization screen; fixing it was worth a potential 48,000 hours a year. An agent handling those quotes should know the step is mandatory, and why. An agent routing cases should know which path your best performers follow and where the compliance checkpoints sit. Feed mined process maps, proven variants, and real KPIs into agent design (at Pega, mined insights flow into Blueprint) and the agent stops improvising. It works the way your business has already proven work should flow.
Performance review: Mine what your agents actually did
Every agent run produces a log: steps, tool calls, decisions, tokens. Agent mining applies process mining discipline to that record and answers what no dashboard does. Where agents loop on failed steps and burn tokens. Where they drift from the intended process and create compliance exposure. Where handoffs between agents break silently. Where cost concentrates.
One organization mined the logs of its agentic business development tool and found a single step driving 25% of total processing. Simplifying it cut cost immediately, with no model change.
Regulated industries get a second payoff. When an agent denies a claim, “the model decided” will not satisfy a regulator. A mined execution record will.
The companies that win run this as a loop
Onboarding and review aren’t one-time events for people, and they aren’t for agents either. Discover how work really runs, design agents around that reality, watch their execution. Improve. Repeat. Companies running that loop turn agent spending into agent returns. Companies that skip it keep paying day-one salaries for day-one mistakes.
References
- PwC AI Agent Survey (statistics on AI budgets, CEO outcomes, and agent supervision): pwc.com/us/en/tech-effect/ai-analytics/ai-agent-survey.html
- Pega Task Mining whitepaper, “From Friction to Flow: A data-driven, human-centered approach to achieving operational excellence” (US insurer pre-authorization case study). Product overview: pega.com/insights/resources/pega-task-mining
- Pega Agent Mining materials (execution cost comparison and the agentic business development example). Pega Process Mining: pega.com/products/platform/process-mining
- Rene Voogt, “How process mining tools can take your business where it needs to go,” Pega Blog, April 2023 (the business map concept): pega.com/insights/articles/how-process-mining-tools-can-take-your-business