// Resources
An agentic workflow is a chain of tasks an AI system completes on its own - triggered automatically, running end to end, no human driving each step. Here's what agentic workflows are, how they differ from simple automation, and what they can run for a business.
An agentic workflow is a sequence of tasks an AI system carries out on its own - triggered automatically, moving through multiple steps, using tools and making decisions along the way, and finishing without a human driving each step. It's the difference between AI that waits for you and AI that runs a process for you. Agentic workflows are what let a business hand off entire recurring processes - not just single tasks - to a system that operates in the background, including while no one's working.
"Agentic" describes AI that acts with agency - it takes initiative toward a goal rather than just responding to prompts. A simple automation does one predefined step. An agentic workflow strings together many steps, adapts to what it encounters, uses different tools as needed, and pursues an outcome. Give it a goal - "process these incoming files and build the records" - and it handles the sequence: fetch, read, interpret, decide, structure, store, notify. The agency is in navigating the whole process, not just executing one instruction.
| Simple Automation | Agentic Workflow | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | One predefined step | A full multi-step process |
| Adaptation | None - fixed path | Adapts to what it encounters |
| Tools | Usually one | Uses several as needed |
| Decisions | None | Makes them along the way |
| Runs | When triggered, one action | End to end, autonomously |
| Handles | A task | A process |
Because they handle whole processes, agentic workflows can take over work that used to need a person coordinating it: ingesting and processing incoming data from start to finish, monitoring for events and responding, gathering information from multiple sources and compiling it, or running a recurring operational sequence on a schedule. The value is that an entire process - not just a single task - runs on its own, freeing the person who used to shepherd it through each step.
An agentic workflow doesn't keep office hours. Once it's built, it can run on a trigger or a schedule at any time - processing overnight, responding to events as they happen, keeping work moving when no one's at a desk. For a business, that means throughput isn't capped by working hours or headcount. The process that used to wait for someone to get to it just happens, continuously, in the background.
The system we built for the 3D-scanning lab at Universidad Maimonides is an agentic workflow, not a single automation. Given a batch of data files, it runs the whole sequence on its own: ingesting fifty to a hundred at once, reading and interpreting each, extracting the right fields, building structured records, linking related sources, and generating lookup codes - end to end, no human stepping through it. That's the shift from automating a task to automating a process, and it's what returned about fifteen hours a week.
A sequence of tasks an AI system completes on its own - triggered automatically, moving through multiple steps, using tools and making decisions, and finishing without a human driving each step. It automates a whole process rather than a single task, running end to end in the background.
Simple automation does one predefined step; an agentic workflow handles a full multi-step process, adapting to what it encounters, using several tools, and making decisions along the way. Automation handles a task; an agentic workflow handles a process, autonomously.
Run whole recurring processes on their own: ingesting and processing data end to end, monitoring for events and responding, gathering and compiling information from multiple sources, or running operational sequences on a schedule. They free the person who used to coordinate each step of the process.
Yes - that's the point. Once built, they run on triggers or schedules autonomously, including outside working hours, so throughput isn't limited by headcount or office hours. A well-built agentic workflow operates in the background without someone watching it.
Closely related - an AI agent is the system that acts autonomously; an agentic workflow is the multi-step process that agent runs. In practice they go together: you build agentic workflows using AI agents to carry out the steps. Both are about AI doing the work rather than answering questions about it.
We build agentic workflows that take over recurring processes end to end - so they run without you.