Factory. Agents. Skills. Tools.

FAST in one breath

Factory — are you set up to ship agents on a repeatable cadence, with a single owner per pipeline? Agents — who's doing the work? (human-in-the-loop vs autonomous) Skills — what does the agent need to know to do it well? Tools — what infrastructure does the skill plug into?

The order is the strategy. Most automation programs run it in reverse — they start with Tools ("we just bought n8n"), invent a Skill to justify the tool, hire or assign an Agent, then desperately reverse-engineer the Factory… by which point they have five disconnected tools and no operating model. That's how you end up with five tools and zero automations.

F — Factory

Factory is the operating model. FAST means running your business as a Factory of agents, not a string of one-off automations.

Factory asks two questions:

• Cadence. Do you have a repeatable rhythm for shipping agent + skill + tool combos? Weekly, biweekly — pick one and stick to it.
• Ownership. Does every pipeline have a single named owner accountable for the outcome? Shared ownership = no ownership.

Without Factory, A/S/T become disconnected tools nobody runs. With Factory, every ship gets faster than the last.

A — Agents

Decide: human-in-the-loop, supervised agent, or autonomous?

• Human-in-the-loop: every action requires human approval. Use for high-stakes outputs (legal docs, big-money decisions).
• Supervised: agent runs, human spot-checks weekly. Use for repeatable knowledge work.
• Autonomous: runs without you. Use for low-stakes, high-volume work where errors are recoverable.

Choosing the wrong tier is why "agents don't work" — autonomous on a high-stakes task burns trust; human-in-the-loop on a low-stakes task burns your time.

S — Skills

Skills are the capabilities the agent needs. The portable knowledge.

For a lead-nurture pipeline: knowledge of your product, your tone of voice, your existing email templates, your pain-point library. Captured as markdown SKILL.md files the agent can read.

Skills are agent-agnostic. Build them once, swap the underlying agent later.

T — Tools

Tools are connections — how the skill plugs into the world.

For lead nurture: Resend (for sending), your CRM (for contact data), your portal (for source data on the lead). Plumbing, not strategy.

Most people start at T. That's the trap. Start at F.

Action in 10 minutes: Write a one-sentence Factory statement for your next pipeline — what does it ship, on what cadence, who owns it? If you can't compress it to one sentence, the pipeline isn't ready yet.