What records should we sort out when an employee who used AI agents leaves?
Sort four things before the last day: inventory every agent connection and credential the leaver used, transfer ownership of their job records and open handovers to named successors, export anything the role held that the team still needs, and revoke their access, with the revocations themselves recorded. The records stay; the access goes; the handover of both is documented.
Departures expose a modern gap in offboarding: the checklist covers laptops and building passes while the leaver's agents, connections, and in-flight client handovers belong to no list at all. The risks run both ways. Access that survives departure is a security exposure; records that depart with the person are an operational and evidential loss, because their jobs' context walks out readable by no one.
The inventory step uses the access record this file's other pages maintain: if it exists and is current, the leaver's connections are already listed, which is one more return on keeping it. Ownership transfer is the step with a deadline inside it: open handovers need a living owner who can answer the client, chase the acceptance, and close the job, and completed records need an owner who can produce them on request. Name both before the last day, on the record.
Revocation closes the loop, and recording the revocations matters as much as performing them: months later, the question "could the leaver still reach this" is answered from the offboarding record, not from someone's memory of a busy Friday. File the completed checklist with the access inventory; it is the exhibit that the departure was handled as a records event, not only an HR one.
Checklist: the AI-work leaver sort-out
1. Inventory: every agent connection, credential, and client system the leaver could reach, pulled from the access record and confirmed with the leaver. 2. Transfer: open handovers and active jobs reassigned to named successors, noted on each record. 3. Export: role-held material the team needs, into team storage, locations recorded. 4. Revoke: personal access to agents, connections, and record systems removed; shared credentials the leaver knew rotated. 5. Record: the completed checklist filed with the access inventory, recorded by the owner of the process. 6. Client note: affected clients told who owns their work now, before they discover it by asking.
Worked example
The transfer step's object is concrete: an open handover like https://zambo.dev/handover/bd7e5325-33fd-4c5e-b029-76b781fa2f51 , decision still pending, is exactly the artefact that dies ownerless in a bad departure. On the checklist it gets a named successor before the last day, and the client gets one message naming the new owner.
Frequently asked questions
The departure is sudden or hostile. What changes?
Order, not content: revoke first, inventory from the access record rather than from the leaver, and transfer ownership under supervision. A current access inventory is what makes the sudden case executable in hours instead of weeks.
Do the leaver's completed job records name them forever?
The producer labels on records are history and stay accurate: the work was done under their hand. Ownership of the records, the right and duty to produce and explain them, transfers to the successor. Erasing the label would falsify the record.
What about the leaver's personal AI accounts used for work?
Anything in a personal account that the business needs should never have lived only there; the export step retrieves what exists under the employment terms, and the standing fix is the rule that client work runs in team systems, which the January setup in this set establishes.
By Brennan Zambo, founder of Zambo.
Last verified: 2026-10-17.
Try a handover
A handover gives your client one proof link with verifiable receipts to review, then Accept or Flag.
try it: say 'use zambo to hand this over to <client>' in your ai