Room to act.
Clear authority.
Decide what an agent may read, where a model may process it and which actions require a person. Harmony’s control design treats access, processing and action authority as separate decisions—not one blanket permission.
Who may access it?
The acting identity, agent bindings and source permissions establish what information can be read.
Where may it be processed?
The participating agent, data spaces and connectors constrain the eligible model deployments.
Who may act on it?
Reading a record, preparing a message and sending it are separate operations with separate authority.
The stricter source
sets the boundary.
Each resource is marked Self-hosted only or Approved deployments only. Approval identifies specific deployments selected by your organization, including their processing location and terms.
Try the Finance example. An external option allowed by the agent is still excluded by a source that requires self-hosted processing. If no eligible deployment is available, the step pauses.
The same restriction must follow extraction, embeddings, summaries, connector results, delegation and retries. A shorter summary does not erase where the information came from.
Prepare the finance brief.
Finance sources exclude the external option. The stricter restriction stays with this task.
Restrictions follow relevant summaries, tool results and handoffs.
Private operation is more
than where the app runs.
Account for the model, knowledge index, working records and operational access. Explore how choosing a model changes the path, and how a restricted source can block it.
This shows a proposed processing path. Identity, permitted operations, storage, backups and support access still require their own scope.
A proposal is not
permission to send.
An agent may be allowed to read an invoice and prepare a billing reminder without being allowed to send it. Define the permitted operation, recipient and limits; retain financial or customer commitments with the appropriate person.
An approval should identify the specific proposal and its scope. Changed amounts, recipients or supporting facts need a fresh decision—not an earlier approval applied to different work.
Access can change.
The work must respond.
A continuing responsibility is not a permanent grant. Evaluation should check that withdrawn source access, expired approval or a changed processing policy pauses the affected step, including after a retry or a handoff.
Review records should distinguish the evidence used, the proposal, the person’s decision and the operation actually completed. Agree retention for those records, summaries and diagnostics rather than keeping everything indefinitely.
Plan the connections and rolloutWhat would you
stop chasing?
Bring one recurring process. We’ll map what an agent can carry forward,
the decisions your team keeps and how to evaluate the result.