Designing the Right AI Agent for Your Organization

In a previous article, we highlighted the different types of AI agents emerging across organizations. The next step is moving from categories to strategy: understanding which agent best fits your organization’s needs—and how to design it so it solves the right problems, integrates into real workflows, and earns adoption.

That’s where a structured, human-centered design process becomes essential.

At Clarendon Partners, we apply a UX-driven framework—Discover, Define, Design & Deliver—to help clients shape agent strategies that are grounded in real needs and positioned for measurable outcomes.

Discover

Before investing in development, organizations need to uncover where AI can truly make a difference. This stage focuses on research and empathy, capturing how people actually work today and where friction slows them down.

We help clients:

  • Conduct contextual inquiry through interviews, observation, and journey mapping

  • Surface pain points, inefficiencies, and risks in current processes

  • Translate insights into opportunity areas where agents can create measurable value

This ensures organizations aren’t chasing the latest technology trends, but identifying genuine user and business needs worth solving.

Define

Once opportunities are uncovered, focus turns to framing the right challenges and aligning them with outcomes that matter to both the business and its users.

Clarendon Partners works with clients to:

  • Develop clear problem statements that articulate needs and desired results

  • Use prioritization frameworks to identify high-value opportunities

  • Align the right type of agent to each challenge, ensuring a tailored strategy

This stage provides clarity and purpose, grounding every agent initiative in validated needs rather than assumptions.

Design & Deliver

Here, strategy becomes reality. We design agents that are usable, trusted, and feasible, while preparing organizations for implementation and adoption.

Our approach includes:

  • Creating service blueprints, user flows, and prototypes to model the agent experience

  • Testing iteratively with end users to validate usability, trust, and guardrails

  • Collaborating with client development teams or technology partners to ensure feasibility

  • Supporting rollout and adoption planning to help agents succeed in practice—not just on paper

This bridges design and execution, ensuring every agent strategy is both actionable and sustainable.

From Technology to Trust

When organizations ground their AI strategy in UX principles, they move beyond one-size-fits-all solutions. Instead, they create agents that solve meaningful problems, fit naturally into workflows, and deliver measurable outcomes.

The result is not just functional technology—but agents that people trust, adopt, and rely on to make their work better every day.

Is your organization exploring AI agents?
Clarendon Partners can help you identify where they’ll create the most value and design the right solution to fit.

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How Will AI Agents Change the Way You Work?