Post by Dato' Subra Suppiah

"Agentic AI" is the hottest phrase in every vendor pitch right now. Most of it isn't agentic. The word has gone the way of "cloud" circa 2010 — universally claimed, rarely understood. Businesses are paying agentic prices for ordinary automation. Some are deploying autonomous systems in places where they really shouldn't be. So let's draw the line. —— An agentic AI system is given a goal and a set of tools. What it is not given is a script. It reasons, acts, observes the result, and decides what to do next. Nobody drew the flowchart in advance — it doesn't exist until the agent runs. In a workflow, intelligence sits inside the steps. In an agent, intelligence decides the steps. —— Customer service: A customer messages to say their line was suspended despite paying, and they're boarding a flight in an hour. A keyword bot has nothing. An agent finds the payment was misapplied, reinstates the line, and confirms — before they reach the gate. Contract risk: 200 vendor contracts routed by value through a pipeline. An agent reads every one — a shifted liability cap in contract 12 triggers scrutiny across 20 contracts from the same vendor. It surfaces the eight needing legal review. No pipeline could script that chain because nobody knew what the contracts said until the agent read them. Fraud investigation: A workflow flags a transaction. A pipeline checks fixed systems and hands off. An agent has no fixed sequence — what it finds determines what it looks at next. Spots a mule account pattern, pulls login and device history, finds a prior alert closed without action, builds the case. That path exists nowhere in code. Sales follow-up: An agent reviving dormant leads reads every past conversation. One wanted a feature that now exists. Another went cold on price — the current promo applies. A third showed no real intent — left alone. Same goal, different judgment for every lead. —— One question cuts through the marketing: can the system take a path you didn't program? If every route was drawn by a developer before deployment — whatever the brochure says — you have a workflow. Ask your vendor that question. How quickly they answer will tell you a lot. —— Workflows are often the right choice — deterministic, auditable, predictable. Exactly what you want where "the AI improvised" is not something you want to explain to an auditor. Use a workflow when the path can be known in advance. Use an agent when it can't. The businesses that win won't be the ones that bought the loudest buzzword. They'll be the ones that demanded precision from their vendors instead of vocabulary. This is the condensed version. The full article goes deeper on each scenario and the honest case for when workflows are actually the better choice. Full article → https://lnkd.in/gCsDBnrh #AgenticAI #AI #Malaysia #EnterpriseAI #DigitalTransformation