Making AI Actually Do Work: A Pragmatic Guide to Orchestrating Agentic Workflows
The 'Integration Hell' of 2026 Last week, I was looking at a client's customer service workflow. They had a shiny new LLM-powered chatbot, but it was essentially a glorified FAQ search. If a customer asked, 'Where is my refund for order #1234?', the bot would just recite the refund policy. To actually process that refund, a human still had to log into a legacy ERP, verify the payment status in Stripe, and then manually trigger a notification in Zendesk. In real projects, this is where the 'AI magic' usually dies. We have the intelligence, but it's disconnected from the plumbing. When we talk about 'Agentic' workflows in an enterprise context, we aren't talking about digital employees with feelings; we are talking about LLMs that have been granted specific, governed access to execute functions across a multi-cloud environment. It’s about moving from 'AI as a talker' to 'AI as a doer'. Moving Beyond Chatbots To get an AI to...