Moving Beyond the Chatbox: Engineering Interconnected AI Workflows That Actually Work
Last month, one of our business units proudly showed off their third 'Copilot' of the year. It was a slick-looking chat interface that could summarize their internal documentation. When I asked if it could actually initiate a refund in our legacy billing system or check real-time inventory in our SAP instance, the room went quiet. Like most enterprises, we had built a collection of expensive, isolated chatbots that could talk, but couldn't actually do anything. The honeymoon phase with simple generative AI interfaces is ending. In real projects, we’re finding that the 'Chat-to-Search' pattern has a very low ceiling for ROI. The real shift happening now isn't about making smarter chatbots; it’s about moving the 'brain' out of the UI and into the middleware. We are moving toward orchestrated AI workflows—essentially, a network of specialized services that use LLMs to navigate business logic, handle exceptions, and call APIs autonomously. The Shift fro...