Agentic workflow
What is Agentic workflow?
A business process carried out by AI agents that plan the steps, use tools and adapt as they go, instead of following a fixed script. Traditional automation breaks when reality doesn't match the rules. An agentic workflow reads the goal and finds a path to it. It's how digital labor gets applied to real work.
Why it matters
The practical change an agentic workflow brings is less about capability and more about control. With scripted automation a human decides every step and the system just executes, so testing means checking that one fixed path. Hand the system a goal instead and let it choose the steps, and you gain the ability to handle situations no one scripted, but you give up knowing in advance exactly what it will do. So the whole discipline of oversight moves. Instead of verifying one predetermined route, you set boundaries on what the agent may touch, log what it actually did, and design for the times it takes a path you did not foresee. The power and the unpredictability arrive together.
In practice
A scripted bot that reconciles orders breaks whenever a supplier changes an invoice layout, and someone has to rewrite it. An agent given the goal “match these invoices to purchase orders” copes with the new layout on its own. The trade is that it now needs guardrails on which systems it may write to, and a log the team reviews, because its exact steps are no longer fixed ahead of time.
