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 a system: context, tools, permissions, traces, evals, and feedback loops around the model.
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: Pydantic AI, LangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK.
Related resources
AI agents that act on business events with the tools, memory, approvals, and traces you can audit. Workflows that ship to production, not just demos.
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.