Beyond the Chatbot: Engineering Multi-Agent Workflows that Actually Work in Production
Last month, I sat in a steering committee where a VP asked why we were still paying for three different 'Copilot' subscriptions when our procurement cycle still takes fourteen days and requires six manual approvals. The uncomfortable truth is that while we’ve spent the last year giving everyone a personal assistant, we haven’t actually automated any core business processes. We’ve optimized the individual, but the enterprise architecture is still as fragmented as ever. In real projects, the transition from 'Assisted AI' (typing into a box) to 'Agentic AI' (systems that take action) is where things usually break. We are moving away from static blueprints toward environments where agents—specialized pieces of code wrapped around an LLM—negotiate with each other across our hybrid cloud. If you think managing microservices was a headache, wait until you have a dozen autonomous agents trying to reconcile an invoice across SAP and a legacy on-prem SQL database withou...