Enterprise AI Integration Checklist

1. System inventory

List every source and destination system involved in the workflow: CRM, ERP, ticketing, email, file storage, data warehouse, document management, knowledge systems, collaboration tools, and internal applications.

2. Interface inventory

For each system, document supported APIs, webhooks, queues, database access, file exchange, SDKs, and any approved screen-level automation. Record rate limits, pagination, payload limits, and sandbox availability where relevant.

3. Identity and authentication

Determine whether the workflow uses service accounts, OAuth, API keys, workload identity, delegated user access, or another mechanism. Prefer scoped identities that can be rotated and monitored.

4. Authorization

Separate what the agent needs to read from what it may create, update, send, approve, or delete. Avoid granting broad write access simply because the integration makes it easy.

5. Data contracts

Define required fields, identifiers, formats, validation rules, source-of-truth systems, and how conflicting records are handled. Model output should not silently redefine enterprise data semantics.

6. Idempotency and duplicate handling

Decide how repeated events, retries, timeouts, and partial failures are recognized so the workflow does not create duplicate tickets, messages, records, or financial transactions.

7. Failure modes

Document behavior for authentication failures, rate limits, unavailable APIs, malformed responses, stale data, timeouts, and downstream rejection. Define bounded retries and escalation queues.

8. Observability

Track workflow state, tool calls, latency, failures, retries, exceptions, and human interventions at a level appropriate to the process. Keep sensitive data out of logs unless it is genuinely needed.

9. Environment separation

Use appropriate development, test, staging, and production credentials and endpoints. Avoid validating a new agent against live write-enabled production systems when safer test environments are available.

10. Change management

Identify who owns API changes, schema changes, permissions, credentials, source data, and business rules. Integrations degrade when their dependencies evolve without coordinated testing.