AI Agent Runbook Template
An operational runbook template for teams managing production AI agents, covering spend, safety, and incident response.
What's included
Agent overview
- Name, version, owner
- Capabilities and tool access
- Spend category and budget source
Operational parameters
- Daily spend ceiling
- Per-call cost estimate
- Expected token burn rate
- Concurrent session limit
Monitoring
- Key metrics to watch
- Anomaly thresholds
- Dashboard URL
Escalation
- On-call rotation
- Page conditions (e.g., spend > $X/hr)
- Shutdown procedure
- Rollback procedure
How to use this template
- Copy the structure into your preferred tool (Notion, Google Docs, Excel, or your internal wiki)
- Customize the fields for your specific context and team
- Use sipi.bot to operationalize the template with live data and automation
- Review and iterate after your first full cycle
Why this template works
A good template eliminates decision fatigue and ensures consistency. This agent runbook template template was designed specifically for spend firewall workflows, drawing on best practices from teams that have refined it over many cycles. Instead of starting from a blank page, you start 80% of the way there.
How to use this template
This template is a starting point, not a finished policy. Copy it into your team's documents, adapt the specifics to your agents and your risk tolerance, and pair it with a spend firewall that actually enforces it. A policy on paper does not stop a runaway loop; an enforced policy does.
sipi.bot is a spend firewall for autonomous AI agents. It sits between your agent code and your payment methods, evaluating every transaction against your rules in under 5 milliseconds and returning one of three structured decisions: approve, block, or flag. Per-transaction limits, daily ceilings, velocity caps, merchant allowlists, and human-in-the-loop escalation are all enforced before a dollar moves. Pricing starts at $99 per month.
What every template should cover
Regardless of the specific template, every agent spend policy needs to address five things: who (which agents the policy applies to), what (which transactions are in scope), when (the time windows and velocity limits), how much (per-transaction and daily dollar ceilings), and what-else (merchant allowlist and human-in-the-loop thresholds). If any of these five is missing, the policy has a gap a runaway incident can exploit.
Pairing the template with enforcement
Once you have adapted the template, encode it as a sipi.bot policy. Each section of the template maps to a policy lever: per-transaction limit, daily ceiling, velocity cap, merchant allowlist, escalation threshold. The mapping is direct — if the template says 'agents may not transact above $5 without human approval', that becomes a $5 per-transaction limit with a flag outcome that triggers a human-review workflow.
Reviewing and updating
Policies go stale. Agents change, merchants change, pricing changes. Schedule a quarterly review of every policy derived from this template. The audit log is the input: look at blocked and flagged transactions, look at near-misses, and tune. A policy that has not been updated in a year is almost certainly miscalibrated.