Agentic Workflow

An agentic workflow is a multi-step business process where AI agents handle the execution autonomously — planning steps, using tools, evaluating results, and adjusting their approach without requiring a human to guide each step.

From manual to agentic

Consider a weekly competitor analysis:

Manual workflow: You search each competitor's website, check their social media, read their blog posts, compare pricing, note changes, and write a summary. Time: 3-4 hours.

AI-assisted workflow: You paste competitor URLs into an AI and ask it to analyse each one. You copy outputs into a document. Time: 45 minutes.

Agentic workflow: An agent receives "Run weekly competitor analysis." It searches each competitor automatically, extracts relevant data, compares changes from last week, writes a structured report, and delivers it to your inbox every Monday at 8am. Your time: 2 minutes to review.

The agentic workflow spectrum

Not all workflows need to be fully agentic. The spectrum runs from manual to fully autonomous:

1. Human-driven, AI-assisted: Human does the work, AI helps with individual steps (drafting, research, analysis)
2. Human-triggered, AI-executed: Human kicks off the workflow, AI completes the multi-step process, human reviews the output
3. Event-triggered, AI-executed: A system event (new email, scheduled time, form submission) triggers the AI workflow automatically
4. Fully autonomous: The AI monitors for conditions, triggers itself, executes, and delivers — with logging and exception handling for human review

Most business value sits at levels 2 and 3. Level 4 is powerful but requires extensive testing and monitoring.

Building agentic workflows

The components: - Trigger: What starts the workflow (manual, scheduled, or event-based) - Agent(s): The AI that plans and executes steps - Tools: What the agent can access (search, files, APIs, databases) - Quality gates: Checkpoints where output is verified before proceeding - Delivery: Where the final output goes (email, Slack, document, database)

Common agentic workflows

• Content pipeline: Trigger (editorial calendar) → research → outline → draft → edit → format → publish
• Lead qualification: Trigger (form submission) → score lead → enrich with company data → route to sales rep
• Report generation: Trigger (weekly schedule) → pull data → analyse → write narrative → distribute
• Customer onboarding: Trigger (new signup) → send welcome sequence → track engagement → escalate inactive users

Key consideration: Agentic workflows are only as reliable as their weakest step. A workflow that works 95% of the time still fails 1 in 20 times. For high-stakes processes, always include human review before final delivery.