What is an Agentic Workflow?

Where a conventional workflow diagram fixes every branch ahead of time, an agentic workflow only fixes the goal and the available tools; the agent decides the actual path at runtime based on what it observes at each step. A research task, for instance, might involve searching, reading several sources, deciding some are unreliable, searching again, and only then synthesizing an answer, a sequence no static flowchart specified in advance. Designing a good agentic workflow means defining clear stop conditions, checkpoints where a human or a verification step reviews progress, and explicit boundaries on what the agent is allowed to do without approval. Without those boundaries, an agent's flexibility becomes a liability, since it can wander into unintended actions while technically pursuing its assigned goal.