Plan your genie scope

Your genie is more reliable when your job description is clear and focused. A clear and focused job description results in a well-scoped genie. Genies scoped too broadly get built, demoed, and quietly abandoned because they are unreliable in production, hard to maintain, and impossible to improve incrementally.

This page explains how to scope a genie for reliability.

Define scope using subdomains

A business domain is a broad functional area, such as IT, HR, Sales, or Finance. A subdomain is a focused slice within that domain that serves a specific user persona with a specific set of tasks. The subdomain is the recommended unit to scope your genie.

The following examples show how common business domains break down into well-scoped subdomains:

HR

• Employee self-service: Leave requests, policy questions, and personal data updates for all employees
• Recruiting coordination: Interview scheduling, candidate communication, and requisition tracking for recruiters
• Onboarding: New hire task completion, equipment requests, and system access for employees in their first 90 days
• Benefits administration: Enrollment, changes, and eligibility questions for benefits-eligible employees

IT

• Employee helpdesk: Password resets, access requests, and software installation for all employees
• Incident management: P1/P2 escalation, stakeholder communication, and resolution tracking for IT support agents
• License management: Usage monitoring, optimization recommendations, and provisioning for IT admins
• Change management: Change request submission, approval routing, and impact assessment for engineers

Sales

• Account research: Account summaries, prospect intelligence, and news monitoring for account executives
• Pipeline management: Opportunity updates, renewal tracking, and forecast hygiene for sales managers
• CPQ: Quote creation, discount approval, and product configuration for deal desk and AEs
• SDR productivity: Lead research, outreach drafting, and meeting scheduling for SDRs

Design for a specific user persona

You must design your genie for a specific user persona in addition to scoping by subdomain.

Genies that serve too many user types receives too many different kinds of requests. This requires different skills, different knowledge base content, and different response styles. Answer the following questions before you write the job description for your genie:

• Who is the primary user?: Name the specific role or persona. This should be a specific person in a specific role doing a specific job.
• What are the three to five tasks this persona performs most frequently?: These tasks become your use case categories in the job description.
• What does this persona already know?: The genie's response style and level of detail should reflect the persona's existing knowledge.
• What would this persona never ask?: Knowing the boundaries of the persona's requirements defines what is out of scope.

Use the following examples to create your persona definition:

❌ Not recommended	✅ Recommended
Employees	New hires in their first 90 days
Users	Enterprise account executives managing renewals
Staff	IT support agents triaging P1 incidents

Start with a focused genie

Start with a focused scope genie and expand deliberately. A narrow scope ensures that your genie can perform a small number of tasks reliably. You can add use case categories, skills that serve the same persona, and expand the knowledge base with additional content after the genie is in production and working reliably.

A well-scoped genie typically has the following:

• Two to three use case categories in the job description
• Three to five skills
• One focused knowledge base
• One clearly defined user persona

Scope your genie

Use the following guidelines as a reference to define your genie's scope:

❌ Not recommended	✅ Recommended
A single genie that handles an entire business domain, such as an HR Genie covering every HR process for every employee type.	A separate genie per subdomain, with each genie built around a specific persona and task set. For example, a leave management genie for individual contributors.
A knowledge base that mixes IT policies, HR documentation, sales playbooks, and finance procedures.	A focused knowledge base scoped to one subdomain to ensure that relevant results are retrieved.
A genie with many skills across multiple domains, creating ambiguity in skill selection.	Three to five skills within a single domain to enable the LLM to select the correct skill consistently.
A job description that covers many scenarios, use cases, and routing rules across domains.	A job description focused on two to three use case categories for one persona.
Adding use cases for a different persona to an existing genie	Creating a new genie for a new subdomain and connecting through Agent orchestration.

Governance benefits

A focused genie is also easier to govern:

• Access control is cleaner: The user group is clearly defined and the skills it can access are clearly bounded.
• Audit trails are more meaningful: Every action maps to a specific subdomain to streamline compliance reviews.
• Investigations are contained: The scope of the investigation is limited to a single subdomain when something goes wrong.

Refer to Genie governance for more information.