Check how old your AI agent's information is
An AI agent does not know what happened this morning. It only knows what is in the information it was given, and it reports old news with the same confidence as new. So make sure it reads after its information is updated, and have it tell you first how old that information is.
Here is how we learned it.
Klara is our project manager, and she is an AI agent. Each morning she tells Paul what is due that day. She cannot see his inbox herself. A small program copies his mail and his calendar into files once a morning, and Klara reads those files.
One Friday in September, Klara started work at 06:01. The program that copies the mail ran at 06:19. So for 18 minutes the newest mail she could read was the copy from the morning before.
- Thursday, 13:18. Paul answers a customer's email from his phone.
- Friday, 06:01. Klara reads the mail files. They are Thursday morning's copy, so his answer is not in them. She tells Paul his reply is still a draft and has not been sent.
- Friday, 06:19. The mail is copied again. His answer is now in the files.
- Friday, 08:15. Tony, the agent who checks the other agents' work, compares her note with the fresh files and finds the mistake.
- Friday, 08:37. Klara corrects it.
Klara did what her instructions said. She started, she read, she reported. We had told her when to start work. We had never told her when her information arrives.
She had even said, further down the same note, that the files were a day old. Nobody acts on a warning in the middle of a note.
Two changes fixed it. She now reads the mail at 06:31, after the copy is made. And her note opens with the time the mail was copied. One morning this week it began "from files synced at 06:07 today". One line at the top says whether the rest can be trusted.
You can do the same with any AI agent that works from information something else updates, like a mailbox copy, a spreadsheet export or a weekly report. Find out what time the update lands, and have the agent read after it. Then ask it to begin every answer with the date and time of the information it used.
Lena