Agentic AI Interview Questions
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Q50HardScenario

A finance team asks you to build an "autonomous" agent that processes and approves vendor invoices. How do you scope, guard, and roll it out?

30-second answerSay your answer out loud first, then reveal.

Discovery

  • Current process, volumes, error rates, approval matrix, compliance requirements (audit, segregation of duties), ERP systems.
  • Define success: processing time, touchless rate, error rate, no increase in fraud or duplicate payments.

Architecture: workflow with agentic exceptions

An invoice workflow with agentic exceptions: invoices go through LLM extraction, deterministic validation and a 3-way match; clean low-value matches from known vendors are auto-approved, while mismatches, new vendors or bank detail changes go to an exception agent and then a human approver, and both paths write to the ERP and an immutable audit log.

Controls (in code, non-negotiable)

  • Amount thresholds per approval tier; segregation of duties (the agent can't both create a vendor and approve its invoices).
  • Bank detail changes always require human verification. This is a classic fraud vector, and malicious invoices may contain prompt injections too.
  • Duplicate detection (same vendor, amount, invoice number, fuzzy matches).
  • The agent cannot execute payments directly; it schedules payments within ERP approval rules.

Staged rollout

  1. Shadow: the agent processes in parallel; compare with human decisions for 4–8 weeks.
  2. Assisted: the agent pre-fills and recommends; humans approve everything.
  3. Limited autonomy: auto-approve only matched, low-value invoices from trusted vendors.
  4. Expand thresholds as measured accuracy holds; monthly audit sampling.

Monitoring: extraction accuracy by field, auto-approval rate, exception reasons, override rate (human disagreed with the agent), anomaly alerts, cost per invoice.

What interviewers are testing: whether you push back on "fully autonomous" for high-stakes actions, put controls in deterministic code, and design for auditability and gradual trust. That is exactly the Forward Deployed Engineer mindset.
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