Crawl-Walk-Run Automation Gating
Roll out agent autonomy in three explicit tiers — suggest only → act on internal staff → act on external customers — with measurable gates between each.
Intent & Description
🎯 Intent
Roll an agent out in three explicit autonomy tiers with measurable gates between them — Crawl (suggests only), Walk (acts on internal staff), Run (acts on external customers).
📋 Context
You’ve built an agent that could plausibly act autonomously on customer-facing actions — replying to tickets, issuing refunds, modifying production resources. The blast radius of a bad action ranges from a confused colleague to a regulatory incident. Stakeholders want both fast deployment and confidence nothing irreversible happens before the agent is trusted.
💡 Solution
Tag every agent action with an autonomy tier. Crawl emits only suggestions; humans act. Walk executes on internal staff under their approval contract. Run acts directly on external customers. Each tier publishes a metric bar (acceptance rate, internal completion, customer outcome) and a minimum duration. Promotion requires clearing the bar; regression demotes. Critically, tier is per-action-type, not per-agent — the same agent can be in Run on safe actions and Crawl on irreversible ones.
Real-world Use Case
- An agent will eventually act on external customers and the team needs an evidence-based ramp.
- Different action types have very different blast radius.
- Stakeholders need a shared vocabulary for promotion and demotion decisions.
Source
📌 TL;DR
Never give an agent full autonomy on day one — gate promotion through Crawl → Walk → Run with hard metric bars, and demote gracefully when things go sideways.
Advantages
- Forces a measurement program before each autonomy step — no blind promotions.
- The same agent can ship at heterogeneous trust levels per action type.
- Demotion is legible — it’s a tier change, not a rollback.
Disadvantages
- Three tiers can be too coarse for some risk surfaces (consider an autonomy-slider variant for finer control).
- Promotion politics — stakeholders push past the gate when metrics are mixed.