Stop Buying AI Agents When You Need a Workflow (Here's How to Tell)

These questions determine whether you're building a workflow or an agent (and getting it wrong costs months of work or if you do it wrong, lead to you shutting down your project).

Why This Matters

What if the six months you're about to spend building an AI system is solving the wrong problem?

I've watched teams build elaborate agentic systems for straightforward problems, or worse—lock rigid workflows around complex challenges that need flexibility. The cost isn't just wasted time. It's the opportunity cost of what you could have built instead.

The difference between AI agentic workflows and AI agents isn't academic. It's the difference between designing a factory line and hiring a consultant. Both have their place. Confusing them leads to systems that either do too little or spin wildly out of control.

What They Actually Are

An AI agentic workflow is orchestrated sequences where you define the process and AI executes specific steps. You control the flow. AI handles tasks at each node. Think of it like a choose-your-own-adventure book where you wrote all the possible paths.

An AI agent is an autonomous system that decides what to do, when to do it, and how to adapt as it goes. It owns the decision-making. You give it a goal and constraints, then it figures out the path. Sometimes it finds routes you never imagined. Sometimes it gets lost.

The key difference: who owns the decisions about what happens next.

When Each Actually Works

Here's what I've learned from building both and watching others build both.

Use workflows when your process is repeatable and known. When you need predictable outputs. When compliance or audit requirements exist. When you're building for people who don't have deep expertise in the domain—they need guardrails, not open-ended exploration.

Use agents when the problem space is ambiguous. When context changes frequently and you can't anticipate every scenario. When you need creative problem-solving over consistency. When you're working with skilled users who can guide and course-correct when the agent goes sideways.

The mistake I see most: using agents for problems you already know how to solve. You don't need autonomy there. You need reliability.

The Real Tradeoffs

Workflows give you predictability. They're debuggable. You can trace exactly what happened and why. They work for low-complexity problems where the path is clear. The skill required to use them effectively is lower because the system constrains the options.

But workflows are rigid. They break when context shifts in ways you didn't anticipate. They require upfront design effort—you have to map out all the paths before anyone can use them. They can't handle novel situations. They're limited by your foresight as the designer.

Agents give you adaptability. They handle high-complexity problems where you can't map every scenario. They can discover novel approaches you didn't think of. They scale to ambiguous domains where workflows would require infinite branches.

But agents are unpredictable. They're hard to debug when they go wrong because the decision-making is opaque. They require skilled users who can recognize when the agent is off-track and intervene. Without guardrails, they can pursue paths that technically solve the problem but miss the actual intent.

The Decision Matrices

The trap to avoid: assuming agents are always "better" because they're more sophisticated. Sometimes the right answer is the boring one.

Don't mistake sophistication for superiority. Agents aren't inherently better, they're different tools for different problems.

Understand the problem, then choose accordingly.