Agentic Workflow

What Is an Agentic Workflow

An agentic workflow is a sequence of steps in which one or more AI agents plan, act, evaluate results, and adapt their approach to complete a task, as opposed to a fixed, linear pipeline with predetermined steps. The workflow's path can branch or loop based on what the agent discovers along the way, such as retrying a failed step, requesting more information, or skipping steps that turn out to be unnecessary.

How Agentic Workflows Differ From Traditional Pipelines

A traditional automation pipeline executes a fixed sequence of steps defined in advance, such as a continuous integration script that always runs the same commands in the same order. An agentic workflow instead lets an agent decide, at each point, what the next step should be, based on the current state and the goal. This makes agentic workflows better suited to tasks where the exact steps cannot be fully known ahead of time, such as debugging an unfamiliar error or researching an open-ended question.

Common Building Blocks

• Task or prompt: the initial instruction that defines the goal.
• Planning step: the agent determines an approach or breaks the goal into subtasks.
• Tool calls: actions such as running code, querying a database, or calling an API.
• Evaluation: checking whether a step succeeded and deciding what to do next.
• Chaining: connecting the output of one task to the input of the next, sometimes across multiple agents or scheduled runs.

Why Agentic Workflows Matter

Agentic workflows let teams automate tasks that involve judgment or variability, not just repetition. Instead of scripting every branch of logic in advance, the workflow relies on the agent's reasoning to handle cases the workflow's designer did not explicitly anticipate. This flexibility comes with tradeoffs: agentic workflows are harder to predict and test exhaustively than fixed pipelines, which is why many implementations combine agentic decision-making with guardrails, such as tool restrictions, timeouts, or human approval at key points.

Agentic Workflow vs Agent Orchestration

An agentic workflow describes the logical sequence a task follows, planning, acting, adapting, while agent orchestration refers to the underlying system that runs and coordinates the agents carrying out that workflow, including scheduling, resource allocation, and communication between agents. Platforms that support scheduled or chained tasks, running one task's output as the trigger for the next, are providing infrastructure for agentic workflows.