What is an agentic workflow?
An agentic workflow is a business process in which an AI agent carries out some of the steps on its own, while fixed rules and human checkpoints govern the rest. It sits between two older patterns. Traditional workflow automation runs a fixed sequence and breaks on anything it did not expect. A fully autonomous agent decides everything and is hard to control. An agentic workflow fixes the skeleton of the process and lets the agent handle the judgment calls inside each step.
In practice the workflow is a graph of stages. Some stages are deterministic code, such as pulling a record or posting a transaction. Some are agent stages, where a model reads documents, reconciles data, or drafts an output. Some are human stages, where a person approves, corrects, or rejects. The platform tracks which stage each case is in, what the agent did, and who signed off.
Why an agentic workflow matters
Most knowledge work has a structure that rarely changes and content that always does. A prior authorization request always needs the patient’s coverage, the procedure code, and the clinical notes, but the notes arrive as faxes, portal exports, and free text. The fixed structure is cheap to automate, and the variable content is where the hours go. An agentic workflow puts the model to work on the variable part while keeping the process auditable and the final decision with a person.
Agentic workflow in practice
A medical billing office processes claim denials. The workflow starts when the clearinghouse posts a denial. A fixed step pulls the claim, the remittance code, and the patient’s encounter record. An agent stage reads the denial reason, compares it with the clinical documentation, and drafts either a corrected claim or an appeal letter that cites the payer’s own policy. A rules step checks that the draft has every required field. A biller reviews the draft, edits it if needed, and submits it. The office measures days to resubmission and the share of drafts accepted without edits, and widens the agent’s scope only when both numbers hold.
What to watch for
- Decide in advance which steps the agent may complete alone and which require a person, and record that in the process design.
- Keep deterministic steps deterministic; an agent should not do arithmetic or post a transaction that plain code can do reliably.
- Store the agent’s draft, its reasoning, and the reviewer’s changes so the team can see where it goes wrong.
- Design the exception path first, because the cases the agent cannot handle will define how much work the team still does.