Definition
In an agentic workflow the order of steps is set by the people who designed the process: classify the request, fetch the account, draft the reply, check it, send it. Models do the work inside each step, sometimes with tools, but they do not decide the route.
Because the path is fixed, agentic workflows are easier to test, cheaper to run and simpler to audit than fully autonomous agents. They are often the right first step when a company moves from using AI as an assistant to redesigning a process around it.