Fabiana Fournier
Publications
Agent Mentor: Framing Agent Knowledge through Semantic Trajectory Analysis
AI agent development relies heavily on natural language prompting to define agents' tasks, knowledge, and goals. These prompts are interpreted by Large Language Models (LLMs), which govern agent behavior. Consequently, agentic performance is susceptible to variability arising from imprecise or ambiguous prompt formulations. Identifying and correcting such issues requires examining not only the agent's code, but also the internal system prompts generated throughout its execution lifecycle, as reflected in execution logs. In this work, we introduce an analytics pipeline implemented as part of the Agent Mentor open-source library that monitors and incrementally adapts the system prompts defining another agent's behavior. The pipeline improves performance by systematically injecting corrective instructions into the agent's knowledge. We describe its underlying mechanism, with particular emphasis on identifying semantic features associated with undesired behaviors and using them to derive corrective statements. We evaluate the proposed pipeline across three exemplar agent configurations and benchmark tasks using repeated execution runs to assess effectiveness. These experiments provide an initial exploration of automating such a mentoring pipeline within future agentic governance frameworks. Overall, the approach demonstrates consistent and measurable accuracy improvements across diverse configurations, particularly in settings dominated by specification ambiguity. For reproducibility, we released our code as open source under the Agent Mentor library.
Agentic Business Process Management: A Research Manifesto
This paper presents a manifesto that articulates the conceptual foundations of Agentic Business Process Management (APM), an extension of Business Process Management (BPM) for governing autonomous agents executing processes in organizations. From a management perspective, APM represents a paradigm shift from the traditional process view of the business process, driven by the realization of process awareness and an agent-oriented abstraction, where software and human agents act as primary functional entities that perceive, reason, and act within explicit process frames. This perspective marks a shift from traditional, automation-oriented BPM toward systems in which autonomy is constrained, aligned, and made operational through process awareness. We introduce the core abstractions and architectural elements required to realize APM systems and elaborate on four key capabilities that such APM agents must support: framed autonomy, explainability, conversational actionability, and self-modification. These capabilities jointly ensure that agents' goals are aligned with organizational goals and that agents behave in a framed yet proactive manner in pursuing those goals. We discuss the extent to which the capabilities can be realized and identify research challenges whose resolution requires further advances in BPM, AI, and multi-agent systems. The manifesto thus serves as a roadmap for bridging these communities and for guiding the development of APM systems in practice.