Why I deliberately chose NOT to use autonomous AI agents in a regulated industry
I am currently learning how to design agentic AI systems. This post is a brainstorm. I would love to hear your perspective: What would you do differently?
The use case is just a random idea:
An investment firm publishes factsheets, quarterly reports, monthly letters, sustainability reports, disclosures, and more. Every publication goes through the same process: pulling data, writing text, compliance review, approval, translation. Portfolio managers spend days on every publication. During a sharp market decline, transparent communication to investors must go out within hours, exactly when the team is most constrained.
The goal: an agentic AI system that pulls the correct figures from four data sources, drafts text in the firm's tone, checks regulatory compliance (SFDR, BaFin, FNG), and delivers a reviewed report the portfolio manager can judge from the outside.
After studying the Anthropic AI agents and workflow patterns, I designed this one:
- Prompt Chaining as the main pattern. The sequence of the process is fixed: first get numbers, then formulate text, then translate if necessary, then check compliance, then approve. Step 4 logically cannot come before Step 2. Each step is simpler than the overall task.
- Deterministic Guardian instead of LLM-Evaluator. An LLM as an evaluator would not be reproducible. The same input could produce different results in two calls. This would be difficult for a regulatory (e.g., BaFin) audit. The Guardian should always reach the same verdict with identical input. Therefore, the Guardian is not an LLM; it is rule-based routing: a fixed rule set per publication type.
- Parallelization in the DataAgent. The DataAgent calls four independent data sources in parallel: Performance, ESG, Composition, and Risk. This is sectioning within a node. The graph remains linear.
- No Orchestrator-Worker, no Autonomous Agent. Orchestrator-Worker is used when sub-tasks are unpredictable. Here, all sub-tasks are known. An Autonomous Agent would be counterproductive. Freedom of decision in a regulated environment is what you want to avoid.
I look forward to your thoughts. What would you do differently?
The full breakdown including graphics is on my Substack.