Moving Past the Chatbot: Engineering Reliable Agentic Workflows in the Enterprise
I remember back in 2018 when we thought RPA (Robotic Process Automation) was the 'digital worker' revolution. We spent millions on bots that broke every time a UI button moved three pixels. Fast forward to today, and I’m seeing the same patterns with Large Language Models. Most companies are stuck in the 'Chatbot' phase—building internal Q&A tools that basically just summarize PDFs. It’s useful, sure, but it’s not transformative. The real shift I’m seeing in my current projects isn't about better prompting; it's about moving toward agentic systems. These are autonomous or semi-autonomous workflows where the AI doesn't just talk—it acts. We’re talking about systems that can interpret a business goal, look up data across siloed APIs, and execute transactions in an ERP or CRM without a human clicking 'approve' at every single step. But doing this at enterprise scale, across multi-cloud environments, is where things usually fall apart. The Problem: F...