The average CEO cannot tell you the difference between an automation and an AI agent. This breakdown (h/t @wadefoster ) makes it glaringly obvious. An automation is anything that requires no-trust decision making (if this, then that). An AI agent is anything that requires some-trust decision making. The most powerful workflows that I’m seeing businesses use today are neither pure automations nor pure agents. They’re agentic workflows. Agentic workflows get the leverage of AI (read: intelligent decision making) that deterministic software never offered. But they also have the predictability of automations, where the cost of error is too high. Knowledge work will continue to get pushed further right on this spectrum as the technology improves, but today living in the middle is often the sweet spot.