Chapter Five / Step Two
Ground
Connect the agent to your firm’s actual data, documents and policies. This is what it references instead of guessing.
When systems disagree, someone has to decide which one wins. Skip that and the difference reaches a client as an invoice.
Why it matters
Ungrounded, the agent answers from someone else’s records.
Ungrounded, the agent answers from what the AI agent absorbed in training: a fee schedule belonging to some other firm, a reading of a rule that is not your reading, occasionally a document that never existed. What your firm knows sits in the ERP, the AP system, the contract files and the policy drive. The agent has to read those at the moment it is asked, not from anything cached at build time.
What good looks like
A written map of which system holds what, and a designated source of record for every field where two systems could disagree. Someone senior signs that designation. Until they do, every answer downstream carries the ambiguity forward, and you will not be able to tell which answers were affected.
Live systems, current documents, your written policies.
Training data, last quarter’s export, an assumption about market practice.
Figure 5.1
Three systems. One vendor. Two answers.
Vendor 40-118843, amount payable, same close date.
Until the winner is named and written down, the agent pulls from whichever system it queries first, and the difference reaches the vendor as an overpayment.
The decision, written down
| AP systemInvoice amount, adjusted | TRUTH |
| ERPPurchase order amount | REFERENCE |
| Reporting DBMonthly close snapshot | DOWNSTREAM |
In your firm
Your ERP says you owe the vendor $412,000. Your AP system says $438,000. Which number did the agent use to cut the check?
Both are correct. The ERP books the purchase order amount; the AP system books the invoice after freight, tax and change orders. The delta is $26,000 sitting between two definitions of what you owe.
The number was defensible in one system and wrong in the check. Nobody could say afterward which system had been used.