Moving Past the Hype: Building and Governing Agentic Workflows in the Real World
Last month, I was sitting in a design review for a legacy supply chain modernization project. The business lead asked, 'Can’t we just let an AI agent handle the inventory re-orders when stock gets low?' The room went quiet. The developers looked at me, and I looked at our messy patchwork of SAP instances, 15-year-old on-prem SQL databases, and half-baked REST APIs. The answer wasn't a simple 'no,' but it also wasn't the 'yes' the vendor brochures promised. In real projects, we’ve been doing automation for decades with BPMN and static scripts. The shift to 'Agentic' architecture isn't about replacing those systems with a magical black box. It’s about moving from hard-coded logic to a model where an LLM (the 'Agent') decides which tool to call based on a user’s intent. It sounds simple, but when you have to govern this across a hybrid-cloud ecosystem without breaking compliance or burning your entire cloud budget, things get complicat...