Why we treat agents as staff.
GRABS comes out of a simple conviction: an AI agent fails as a tool and succeeds as an employee. The difference is a job description, a manager, a personnel file and the ability to be sacked. Build those four things properly and you have a hire, not a gadget.
The method lineage
A role is composed from a competency library, not invented per client. Each competency is defined in the language of human capability: Knowledge, Skills and Behaviours, plus the Tools, Authority and Co-factors that turn capability into work. The chassis underneath every placement is identical: plan, act, check, calibrate, engage, learn. Calibration is the keystone, because confident wrongness is the defining failure mode of these systems, and a competent employee knows the difference between a grounded judgement and a guess, and says so.
Proven like systems
The discipline that makes this credible is psychometric. Criteria are defined with the Critical Incident Technique, behaviour is scored against anchored rating scales, and reliability and validity are measured the way a serious assessment of a human would be. A probation period becomes instrumented evidence of competence, and the handover carries an attestation: a measured account of what the team did and how well. The next engagement is sold on the record of the last.
An HR discipline, applied to agents
GRABS is led by Eric McLean, FCIPD. The framing is deliberate: this is a human-resources discipline, competency design, assessment and line management, applied to a new kind of worker. The result is a workforce you manage the way you already know how to manage people.
The TCEL connection
GRABS sits alongside TCEL, the consultancy that sells OGSM, strategy maps and execution discipline to the leaders of complex groups, and which has long held that AI belongs inside the strategy, not on top of it. GRABS is how that sentence becomes a deliverable: a senior interim executive who arrives with an instrumented agent team. The portfolio's spine is trusted interim capacity, and a GRABS team is the newest form of it.