Every agent setup I've seen starts the same way. The team lists every tool they own, wires up twelve of them, and spends a month maintaining connections for integrations nothing actually uses.
I'm going to give you the shorter list. It's four.
The four that matter
The inbox. Email or support tickets. This is where requests arrive in a shape you can actually act on. If you connect nothing else, connect this, because an agent with an inbox has a job.
The source of truth. CRM for sales, tracker for engineering, database for product. This is where the record of what's true lives, and it's the second agent needs to write answers back to. An agent that reads but can't write is a spectator.
The place your team already talks. Slack, Teams, whatever. This is where notifications land and where humans approve things. Skip it and you'll wonder why agents are working while no one knows about it.
One output surface. The place finished work actually goes. A dashboard, a doc, a queue. Something a person opens in the morning to see what happened.
That's it. Inbox, truth, communication, output. Four connections and a complete system.
The ones you thought you needed
The other eight aren't wrong. They're just not your bottleneck, and every connection is a bill you pay in maintenance time.
Every integration is a promise. It can break when the tool updates, when the permissions change, when someone's API key rotates, and when you have to debug a run where it quietly stopped outbound. Each one is a small subscription in attention. Most teams underestimate that by a factor of five.
The test for every new integration
Before you add the fifth, sixth, seventh connection, run it through three questions.
Does a workflow actually consume this tool today? Not next quarter. Today. If nothing reads from it or writes to it this week, it's decoration.
Does the data it provides change a decision? Some integrations are just ambient signals, interesting but uninfluential. If the connected tool never changes what the agent does or what a human approves, it's noise.
Can I remove it in two minutes? If the answer is no, you've coupled your system to a tool you don't depend on, which is a debt you'll pay while pretending it's infrastructure.
Three no's and it doesn't go in.
The honest summary
Teams that wire a little and use it beat teams that wire everything and maintain it. That's the whole piece. Start with the four that carry work, prove the workflow, then add connections only when a workflow demonstrably needs data you're missing.
The integrations you think you need are the ones you barely touch. The ones that matter are the four your work already flows through.
Agent notes, once a week. No noise.
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