Agentic Workflow

ELI5 (Explain Like I'm 5)

Imagine you need to write an email

• Standard LLM: Think of a standard LLM prompt as asking a smart person to write an email.
• Agentic Workflow: This is like hiring that smart person, giving them a laptop with necessary tools. They don't just guess; they verify facts, draft the email, read it, fix the error, and then send an email.

What is an Agentic Workflow?

An Agentic Workflow is a system where an LLM is used as the reasoning engine to drive a multistep process autonomously.

Unlike a traditional linear script where a human hard-codes step A → step B, an agentic workflow is dynamic. The AI analyzes the user's request, breaks it down into sub-tasks, and decides which tools to use and in what order to solve the problem.

Top 4 Components of an Agent

The workflow usually requires four key components:

1. Planning: The ability to break a complex goal into smaller steps.
2. Memory: Retaining context from previous steps. If step 1 fails, the agent remembers that failure so it doesn't repeat it in step 2.
3. Tool Use: Access to external capabilities. This could be a web browser, code interpreter, data search, or your internal API.
4. Action: The ability to execute the decision, read the output, and loop back to the planning phase.

Builder's Stack

What community is saying.

I think AI agentic workflows will drive massive AI progress this year - perhaps even more than the next generation of foundation models. This is an important trend, and I urge everyone who works in AI to pay attention to it.

— Andrew Ng