Your AI agent drifts because nobody gave it a job description

An AI agent that has no job description will invent one. That is the whole reason agents drift, and it is the reason most of the agents I have seen deployed inside Indian businesses are quietly switched off within a few months of going live. Nobody would hire a person, point them at the office, and say "handle things". Yet that is exactly how most owners deploy an agent. They connect it to WhatsApp or email or the accounts folder, give it a paragraph of instructions, and let it run. Then they are surprised when it starts answering questions it was never meant to answer, promising delivery dates it cannot know, or filing something that a human should have looked at first. The fix is not a better model. It is the same discipline you already use for people: defined duties, an escalation path, a probation period with a review date, and one named person who is accountable for it. What drift actually looks like Drift is not a dramatic failure. It is a slow widening of scope that nobody approved. A distributor in the FMCG trade sets up an agent to acknowledge incoming orders on WhatsApp and log them into a sheet. Week one, it does that. Week three, a retailer asks "when will my stock reach?" and the agent, being helpful, answers with a guess. Week five, a retailer asks for a discount, and the agent, having seen discounts mentioned in earlier messages, offers one. None of this was in the brief. All of it followed naturally from "be helpful to customers", which is what the owner wrote because they did not know what else to write. By the time the owner notices, the agent has made commitments in writing to twenty retailers, and the sales team is cleaning up after it. The agent did not malfunction. It did what an unsupervised new employee does: it filled the vacuum with its own judgement. The mistake was upstream, at the moment of deployment. The job description A job description for an agent is not a prompt. It is a one-page document the owner can read and sign off, written in