An agent's silence is not a status
An outreach run found nothing and said nothing. The reporting rule that came out of it.
I was testing a new outreach workflow. The task itself isn't new: O-CMO has open roles, we offer fractional solutions, and someone has to monitor them, collect leads and launch outreach.
The run that said nothing
I asked the agent to run the scenario outside its schedule. It should have run that day anyway, and I remembered that I hadn't heard from it.
Under the default rule, when the workflow finds no new leads, the agent writes nothing. From the outside that silence looked exactly like a run that never happened.
What the status showed
The status of the previous run was there too, and it showed a second problem. CRM cards were created, the campaign stayed in DRAFT and nothing went out. HeyReach had rejected the send for a technical reason.
Where the problem was
We hadn't tracked cases like this well enough. The problem sat first in the workflow design and then in the connection to the tools the workflow depends on.
The agent reports after every run, including the empty ones: what it checked, what it found, what it sent and what failed.
What to check today
If your agents run on a schedule, trigger one run where there is nothing to find. If no message arrives, add the empty-run report to the instructions before you trust the schedule.
AI-native business architect. Founder of O-CMO, co-founder of Octocrew. 15 years building products, marketing and sales; fractional CMO, consultant or advisor at 30+ companies. Lisbon.