Agentic Workflow
A workflow where one or more AI agents make decisions about what to do next — choosing tools, gathering context, escalating to humans — rather than executing a fixed script.
Production AI is not a prompt. It is a system of context, tools, permissions, traces, evals, and feedback loops.
What it is
An agentic workflow is a process where part of the control flow is decided by an AI model at runtime rather than encoded ahead of time. Classic workflows have a fixed graph: 'step 1, then step 2, then step 3'. Agentic workflows have a graph plus a model that decides which step to take next based on what it just saw. The result is more flexible — and harder to make reliable.
Why it matters
Many real-world processes don't fit a fixed script: support triage, research, debugging, complex form-filling. Agentic workflows handle those by letting the model adapt. The trade-off is determinism: a fixed workflow always does the same thing; an agentic one might not. Production deployments depend on traces, evals, and approval gates to make agentic behavior accountable.
How it works
The agent loop: receive event, assess context, decide on next action (call a tool, ask a clarifying question, escalate, finalize), execute, observe, repeat. Common patterns: ReAct (reason then act), plan-and-execute, supervisor with sub-agents. Substrates: LangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK, Mastra.
Related resources
A capability in the Group e-media information AI stack. This resource connects the subject to data substrate, agent runtime, evals, and operations.
The execution engine that turns an AI agent from a chat-window demo into a long-running, event-driven, restartable process you can trust with real operations.
The mechanism by which a language model invokes external functions — APIs, databases, code execution, retrieval — and reads the results back to continue its work.
An AI architecture where multiple specialized agents collaborate — each with its own scope, tools, and prompt — coordinated by a supervisor or by direct agent-to-agent communication.