Course Content
Agentic AI Patterns
9 sections · 50 lessons
How does Agentic AI enable scalable automation across enterprise workflows?
What you need to know
Why RPA hit a ceiling
Robotic process automation clicks through screens with fixed scripts. It breaks when a form layout changes or an input is unusual, and those exceptions went to humans. A model can read the unusual invoice or email and decide what it means.
The split of responsibility
| Layer | Owns | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Workflow engine | Order, retries, state, timeouts, audit | Temporal, Airflow, Step Functions, a queue |
| Agent or model step | Judgment on messy input | Classify, extract, decide exception, draft |
| Tools | Access to systems, with permissions | ERP, CRM, email, payments |
| Humans | Approvals and hard exceptions | Review queue with an SLA |
This gives you ordinary distributed-systems reliability, with model flexibility only where it is needed.
What scaling to many workflows needs
- A shared tool and permission layer (often MCP servers owned by platform teams), not each team rebuilding the ERP connector.
- Tenant isolation for data, memory and logs.
- Budgets per task: steps, time and spend.
- An eval set and CI per workflow.
- A human exception queue with clear SLAs.
How to pick workflows
Pick high-volume work where you already know the human cost: handle time, cost per case, error rate. Without a baseline you cannot prove the savings.
A real-life example
A manufacturer's accounts-payable team matches about 18,000 invoices a month against purchase orders and goods receipts, from 600 vendors in different formats.
- Before: RPA handled 55% (clean PDFs from large vendors). The other 45% went to 14 clerks.
- New design: a Temporal workflow per invoice: receive, extract, three-way match, approve, post to the ERP. Two steps use a model: extraction from any layout, and an "exception judge" that reads mismatches ("PO says 500 units, invoice says 5 boxes of 100") and decides whether they are the same.
- Guardrails: mismatches above Rs 25,000 or 2% of value go to a human. Posting to the ERP is a normal code step, never a model decision.
- Result after three months: 84% processed without a human touch, measured against the 55% baseline. Clerks moved to vendor disputes. Model cost is about Rs 3 per invoice, tracked per workflow.
When the ERP was down for 4 hours, workflows paused and resumed on their own. No invoice was lost or posted twice, because the engine, not the agent, owned state.
Follow-up questions to expect
- "Why not let one agent run the whole process?" — Because sequencing, retries and audit are solved problems in workflow engines. Putting them in a model's hands adds cost and unpredictability for no gain.
- "How do you measure ROI?" — Against a pre-agent baseline: handle time, cost per case, touchless rate, error and rework rate.
- "How do you roll out across teams?" — A shared platform: tool servers, permissions, tracing and eval tooling, with each team owning its workflow's golden set.