Agentic Workflows are the new process engineering?

Historically, people inside businesses would wade through ambiguity and turn different back-office work into a sequence of steps. Something they could teach others. Something the business could rely on as consistent in terms of output and cost.

A process.

There’s a lot of talk about agents, and when you surf the X stream of the leading edge, it’s easy to think everyone is driving toward autonomous agents. That’s likely not reality.

What I suspect is quietly happening and emerging is people are tinkering with chat and tool calling, until they find a repeatable workflow that does some unit of work. Then, to ensure consistency, the natural next step is to calcify that into a standard process.

An agentic workflow.