Agent Operations Control Panel
Centralize attention, schedules, pinned work, and daily summaries for agent oversight
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 93%
The Agent Operations Control Panel provides a single supervisory surface for a team of autonomous workers. It prioritizes items that need human attention, exposes scheduled jobs, preserves frequently used workflows as pinned items, and links to dashboards produced by agents. A formatted daily summary can mirror the same state into Slack or another channel, allowing the operator to supervise work without opening every thread. The design follows exception-based management: healthy jobs remain visible but quiet, while approvals, failures, and ambiguous results rise to the top. Organizing the interface by attention state and time reduces the cognitive load of remembering which agents exist, when they run, and what they produced. The control panel governs work rather than performing each task itself.
Origin
Nate Folin demonstrated his Perplexity Computer workspace and Slack summaries as the control panel for his recurring RevOps agents on Marketing Against The Grain.
Core principles
- 01Manage autonomous work through attention rather than constant observation
- 02Separate items needing action from jobs running normally
- 03Keep recurring work and important artifacts easy to reach
- 04Summarize agent activity in the team's existing communication channels
How to run it
- 1
Inventory agent work
List active workflows, scheduled jobs, dashboards, and the actions each can request from a human.
Pro tip Record the owner and normal run cadence for each worker.
Watch out Uncatalogued workers can fail or act without notice.
- 2
Prioritize attention
Create a top-level view for approvals, errors, low-confidence results, and other items requiring intervention.
Pro tip Distinguish blocked work from informational notices.
Watch out If everything is urgent, the queue provides no meaningful prioritization.
- 3
Expose schedules
Show recurring jobs, their current state, and their most recent output.
Pro tip Include expected next-run timing when available.
Watch out A job appearing in a list does not prove that its latest run succeeded.
- 4
Pin critical assets
Keep frequently used flows and dashboards immediately accessible and sort them predictably.
Pro tip Remove pins that no longer support routine decisions.
Watch out An overcrowded pinned area recreates the search problem.
- 5
Publish a daily digest
Send a formatted summary through a channel the operator already checks.
Pro tip Attach direct links to runs that need review.
Watch out Do not expose sensitive CRM or customer data to an inappropriate channel.
- 6
Close the loop
Approve, revise, retry, or escalate each attention item and record the resulting state.
Pro tip Use recurring exception patterns to improve the underlying worker.
Watch out Clearing an alert without resolving its cause creates false confidence.
In the wild
A RevOps operator sees needs-attention items at the top of Perplexity Computer, scheduled jobs below them, and pinned workflows organized by day. A formatted Slack summary provides a second daily view, while hosted dashboards expose areas such as sales pipeline.
→ One person can supervise many recurring workers without manually inspecting every run.
Common mistakes
Tracking agents only in threads
Long, scattered conversations make it difficult to know which workflows are active or awaiting action.
Reporting without links
A summary that cannot lead the operator to evidence or controls creates extra search work.
Confusing visibility with verification
A listed or recently active job still needs reliable run status and output evidence.
Is it for you?
Best for
Individuals or teams operating many recurring agents across business systems.
Not ideal for
It adds little value when only one simple workflow runs occasionally.
From the transcript
“So I can see at the top here everything that needs attention, and I can collapse these sections if I need to. Some of my…”
“I also have uh a formatted Slack kind of summary that I get through computer that attaches every single day with with the things that…”
“So my control panel is computer”
From the episode
How 1 Human + AI Replaced a 15-Person RevOps Team