Agentic Workflow
An agentic workflow is a business process whose steps are executed by AI agents: they plan the work, call tools, read results and decide the next move, instead of following a fixed script that breaks the first time reality differs.
No jargon, no math
In plain words, what is it?
A classic workflow is a railway: the track is drawn in advance and every train follows it. An agentic workflow is a courier with a map. You describe the goal (“check these 40 supplier invoices, match them to purchase orders, flag mismatches”) and the rules (spend limits, when to ask a human). The agent breaks the goal into steps, runs each one through tools, and reads the result before choosing its next move. If a step fails or an invoice matches no PO, it does not crash: it re-plans, tries another route, or escalates to a person. Where it breaks: if the rules are vague, the agent improvises in ways you never intended, so boundaries and logs are not optional.
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Goal and rules. You state the goal and the boundaries: which tools the agent may use, when it must stop.
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Plan. The agent turns the goal into an ordered list of concrete steps.
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Act. Each step runs through a tool, and the result is read before moving on.
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Check. A failed step triggers a re-plan or a hand-off to a human, then the loop resumes.
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Done. When the goal is reached, the whole run is written to a log you can replay.
Terms that live nearby.
AI Agent
An AI agent is software that pursues a goal on your behalf: it reads the situation, plans the next step, acts through tools (email, calendars, databases, APIs) and checks the result before continuing, instead of answering one question and stopping.
ReadAgent Loop
The agent loop is the cycle an AI agent repeats while pursuing a goal: observe the current state, plan the next action, act through a tool, check the result, then continue, re-plan or stop.
ReadPlanner
A planner is the component of an AI agent that turns a goal into an ordered sequence of steps before any action is taken, deciding what to do in which order instead of improvising one move at a time.
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