Build the always-on hygiene agent

The failure mode of every hygiene tool is that it is a button someone has to remember to press. Build the agent as a loop instead, a scheduled job that wakes on a cadence and on triggers. Cadence handles the slow rot: a nightly pass over every open deal checking the six hygiene jobs. Triggers handle the fast events: a call ends, an email arrives, a deal changes stage. The combination means the pipeline is never more than a few hours from honest.

A workable build order:

1. Define the rules as data, not prose. Each hygiene check is a named rule with a condition and an action: "deal in stage 3+ with zero logged meetings in 14 days -> flag stage-integrity". Rules as rows means you tune them without touching code and the agent reasons over them.
2. Wire read access to the activity systems first. Email, calendar, transcripts. Without these the agent is just guessing at the same desk as the rep.
3. Start in suggest-only mode. For the first fortnight the agent writes nothing, it produces a daily hygiene report of what it would fix. You read it, you correct its judgement, you tune the rules. This is how you earn the right to let it write.
4. Promote rules to autonomous one at a time. Once a rule has been right 50 times in suggest mode, let it act. Keep the contestable ones (kills, owner changes, forecast-category moves) as human-approved forever.
5. Log every action with a reason and an undo. Every autonomous edit carries the rule that fired and the prior value. A hygiene agent without an audit trail is a hygiene agent nobody trusts.

Resist building a parallel "clean" database the agent maintains beside the CRM. Two copies always drift, and the rep still works in the dirty one. The agent writes into the system of record so the humans and the forecast read the same clean truth. One pipeline, kept honest in place. If you are starting from a bare CRM, get the foundations right first, an agent cannot keep clean what was never structured. This hygiene agent is one of several in a wider system, see running your whole funnel with AI agents for how they compose.